Microsoft's Gates: Say Goodbye to VoIP As You Know It

Gates: I'd expect there are some things in that area, and we have seen partners see more opportunity with what we offer because of the flexibility and because of the openness. We have partners like Gold Systems who was a top Avaya reseller a couple of years ago now doing more business already even before this release on the Microsoft platform. Because it's a software-driven platform, your ability to connect in your own software extensions or very industry-specific software extensions you find from other people, it's just a lot more flexible. You can pick what kind of handset makes sense because we're open at that level, you can pick the applications software because we're open at that level. It really is the PC approach where it's open at all the different layers, and for the channel, that makes a huge difference because they're the ones that pick how the pieces go together. The more flexibility they get, the more customer-focused they can be.

Do you expect to see Google as a competitor in this voice market because they're already working with some of the IM pieces and there's talk of them doing something around the phone soon, so do you expect to see them moving more in this direction as well?

Gates: They entered the space ... You should do an article on the market share and popularity of Google Talk. I mean, they're here. They haven't been noticed recently. The most excitement is before they release something, generally. Before Google Talk was released it was clearly going to cure cancer, and you can judge, look at the usage numbers, and see how it's going.

Do you expect to see them pushing more into the IP-PBX features as well?

Gates: I'm not aware of that, but Google can do anything, whatever they choose. When it comes to the types of policy management, security, things that businesses want in this space, it certainly doesn't connect to any of their hiring or the experience that they have.

What about your own software-as-a-service plans? How does this UC launch fit into that, and do you expect over time to be looking at an IP Centrex-type hosted service?

Gates: Yes, we see that in the roadmap because we have this general view that anything you can run on a server, you'll also have the choice to be able to run it as a service. Now to do that, where the administrative model of what the customer does vs. what the hoster does and the extensibility, how that fits in and exactly what the quality guarantees are [is complicated]. That whole hosting area had high expectations four to five years ago, and then people become more realistic. We still absolutely believe in it, but it takes a lot of maturity in the software stacks ... We're moving to have symmetry so you can do it on your servers if you want, you can do it hosted if you want, but actually getting all of the pieces to have that perfect symmetry will take a lot of years.

NEXT: Open source not an option