"That's actually a pretty striking number in that amount of time if you look at this market," he says of the 2 million-user gain. Haberkorn, director of product marketing for Lync at Microsoft.
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"We now have roughly 5 million users in the world that don't have a PBX phone anymore," says B.J. More specific to VoIP, or what Microsoft is calling enterprise voice, the company is claiming 2 million new users in the last 14 months. Partners also made up 300 of the 1,000 Lync Conference attendees, according to Microsoft.
#Ms lync 2013 software
Former Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates laid out that vision five years ago, saying, "In the next decade, sweeping technology innovation driven by the power of software will transform communication."Īt its Lync Conference in San Diego, Microsoft reiterated earlier statements that Lync revenues are in the $2 billion-a-year range, and boasted that 90 of the Fortune 100 companies are Lync customers and 1,000 partners have Lync practices. The two companies occupy the leader positions in the grid - higher up and further to the right than any other companies.Īnd Microsoft's software-first vision is gaining ground with customers and the channel.
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placed Microsoft just behind Cisco in one of Gartner's signature "Magic Quadrant" graphics for UC. There's a reason that Trollope is concerned about Microsoft offering what he describes as UC "basics like IM, conferencing and VoIP." Even before the release of Lync Server 2013, analysts at Gartner Inc. And, in our opinion, that could lead to increased complexity, cost and risk, not to mention the hours spent trying to figure out 'who's on first' when troubleshooting is an issue." "These components need to be procured, integrated and supported separately for those who choose to use Lync. "Microsoft's approach with Lync leaves out several important collaboration elements many enterprise organizations find critical today - such as phones, video endpoints, voice and video gateways, networking and cloud PSTN connections," wrote Rowan Trollope, Cisco senior vice president and general manager of collaboration, in a February blog post on the eve of the Lync conference. Cisco called out Microsoft for, among other things, leaving customers with a multiple-vendors-pointing-fingers nightmare when it comes time to diagnose a problem.
#Ms lync 2013 series
The change in attitudes has occurred as Microsoft has kept its foot on the gas pedal for development and evangelism of the platform.Īn example of a competitor taking Microsoft very seriously is Cisco Systems Inc., which recently greeted the first-of-its-kind Microsoft Lync Conference 2013 with a series of blog entries to highlight the shortcomings of Lync. The debate no longer centers on whether Microsoft is a serious competitor in UC - it's now about whether Microsoft is yet a prime-time player and, if so, what prime time in UC looks like. The platform is being taken seriously by competitors, analysts, partners and customers. With Lync 2013 representing the fourth server release for the UC platform, Lync is maturing as Microsoft adds more and more features - filling holes for competitive parity while leveraging Microsoft's mostly software approach to redefine what UC can entail. The progress on the enterprise voice piece serves as a good metaphor for the state of Lync in general. And especially with this 2013 release, very much a bullishness on the part of enterprise IT and the telephony folks in that enterprise space that Lync is alive." So there's a renewed confidence in Lync as a very viable voice platform. "Now, over 50 percent of the new Lync business that's coming our way is enterprise-voice-related. "A year ago only 10 percent enterprise voice," Gode says. Now, though, those technical challenges are getting easier to overcome, the user support issues are diminishing and customers are demanding enterprise voice as part of their Lync implementations. He adds it's wise for organizations to be careful on how VoIP gets rolled out, and that help desk calls diminish as users become more confident.
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"Certainly there's a portion of the consumer population who have gotten used to things like Skype, and are gradually getting comfortable with that notion of VoIP, but it's a different thing when you bring it into the enterprise," Gode says. Gode says the partial approach helped train end users in working with the new modalities of unified communications (UC), while they continued to use regular phones in the traditional, comfortable way.
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There were social engineering reasons to go slow, as well. Scott Gode, Senior Director, Avanade Inc. "A year ago only 10 percent enterprise voice.