I spoke recently at our UC Launch event in Paris, along with M. Antoine Plantier, who has been an early adopter of our UC products at Renault. In his speech Antoine used a French phrase -- page blanche -- to describe our voice solution. His thesis was that we had started our voice thinking with a blank page, which would turn out to be a key differentiator -- it allowed us to focus entirely on meeting today’s communications needs, and to be intentional about which pieces of telephony came forward and which did not. Contrast this approach to another player who entered the telephony space about 8 years ago and has spent the last 8 years trying to replicate PBX features instead of innovating. Our fresh approach allowed us to innovate above and beyond the PBX feature set with powerful capabilities, like Presence, which can significantly improve the communications experience and increase productivity. 

Perhaps most importantly it allowed us to break free of the legacy-bound, idiosyncratic model that has kept telephony completely isolated from the computing revolution happening all around it in the enterprise. The telephony industry in the ‘90s and early part of this decade was quite excited about programmable interfaces like TSAPI, JTAPI and (mea culpa) TAPI. The reality was that these programmable interfaces (APIs) were only known to and understood by the telephony community. The broader developer community -- tens of millions of them -- were unaware and/or uninterested in them. These APIs looked different, were overly complex and had arcane objects/semantics that reflected the complexity of the PBXs they wrapped. These APIs did not seduce, inspire or even help ease developers into using them.  A few software application vendors actually managed to build on top of these APIs, but their adoption remained low and in niche, albeit important, scenarios like contact centers. It is easy to assert, in retrospect, that these APIs never stood a chance in the broad software playing field.

Coming back to the page blanche theme: while I appreciate Antoine’s point of view and accept the compliment, I would like to apply the page metaphor slightly differently than Antoine did. We did not start with a blank page. We borrowed a page from a book very familiar to us at Microsoft -- the book of software. In the same way business processes are being “translated” into software inside enterprises (I use the word translated intentionally instead of transliterated because a lot of design and rethinking goes into this mapping process) we rethought how communications should be approached with software. Our approach naturally allowed us to build something that is as programmable as anything else in software today (classes for databases, presentation, networking, files, etc.) A developer doesn’t find our approach different or intimidating or mired in the complexity of the past. This is why Microsoft Office, SAP, Dassault, Reuters Messaging, enterprise applications like the ones at Global Crossing, and many, many more software applications in the works can integrate so easily with our platform. The promise of communications-enabled business processes can only be fulfilled thru mainstream software platforms and developer tools. So instead of page blanche I would like to call our approach: Logiciel appliqué aux telecommunications or Page Logiciel for short, or just Page Software.

For another perspective on the power of our Page Software approach, read Gartner’s  Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications, 2007 (Gartner, August 20, 2007). This Gartner Magic Quadrant by Bern Elliot evaluates leading vendors in the unified communications market. Gartner positions Microsoft in the Leaders quadrant. According to Gartner, “The Leaders quadrant contains vendors selling comprehensive and integrated UC solutions that directly, or with well-defined partnerships, address the full range of market needs.”

I would also like the take this opportunity to thank M. Plantier and our more than 150 customers and partners who participated in our early adopter program over the last year and have already deployed Office Communications Server 2007: their partnership has been invaluable in defining this product and its successors to come.

- Gurdeep Singh Pall

  Corporate Vice President, Unified Communications Group