10 Questions For Cisco's VoIP Gurus

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Two of Cisco Systems' VoIP experts, Barry O'Sullivan, senior vice president of voice technology, and Richard McLeod, director of unified communications solutions for worldwide channels, recently spoke with CMP Channel Assistant News Editor Jennifer Hagendorf Follet about the changing VoIP market, the challenge of working with Microsoft as it pushes into the unified communications space and what it all means for channel partners. Edited excerpts of the conversation follow.

CMP Channel: As Cisco looks at this market, does it seem like it's becoming more competitive? Are your rivals getting more aggressive in their push toward VoIP and unified communications?

O'Sullivan: There's certainly a lot of competition in the market. We're No. 1 and we only have 25 percent share, so it's still pretty fragmented. There's huge change going on in the industry as well. There are different types of change. One is consolidation. You see some of the competitors going out of public ownership. Other traditional competitors rumored to be for sale, new entrants coming into the market, so a lot of change. But at Cisco we look at change as opportunity. A lot of customers are looking for some certainty and a future-proof path here, so we see a lot of opportunity with the changes in the industry.

I think the industry is going to look very different in three years than what it looks like now. I think there will be less players and different players going after this unified communications market ... I think you'll see all types of players: software vendors, mobile phone vendors, service providers, networking vendors, all of them in that space. And the space is getting bigger too, because the traditional telephony market is $10 billion, and we think the unified communications market is about $25 billion, so we're not all converging on the same field here. The field is getting bigger as well.

CMP Channel: What would you say so far has been the impact of Microsoft's move into this market? Microsoft held its partner conference recently and was talking about it a lot with their partners, many of whom are also your partners. What are you hearing from your partners?

O'Sullivan: First of all, we launched our unified communications strategy about two-and-a-half years ago now, and Microsoft entering we think validated that to a [large] degree. What we hear from our customers and our partners is that they want to make sure there's interoperability. They know there's going to be a lot of overlap between Microsoft and Cisco, but at a lot of companies, both of those vendors are strategic partners. They want Cisco and Microsoft to work together on interoperability, so we've done a lot of that in terms of launching Cisco voice sessions from a Microsoft instant messaging client. Obviously our unified messaging products are deeply integrated with Exchange and Outlook and so on, so that's the No. 1 thing we hear, and the No. 1 impact. So we've got to, with Microsoft, do a lot of work on interoperability. That's been going on now in earnest for about 18 months.

And then people want to know, "well, which horse should I pick?" What we say to them is, "Look, you've got to build a platform and then leave yourself the flexibility and the openness so you can make choices in the future about which way you want to go, so go standards-based." Our view is that the network is the platform because it gives you the flexibility in the future not to be locked into a particular device, or a particular operating system.

McLeod: I might add to that that clearly having another major player in the mix increases the conversation in the press and with customers. Whenever there's more conversation that's more acceleration away from traditional TDM into unified communications. For many of our partners who have a practice in Microsoft and a practice in Cisco unified communications, this could be an opportunity for them to accelerate their end users from both angles, if you will.

NEXT: Getting along with Microsoft

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