Unified Communications Battle: Cisco Versus Microsoft

Posted by Alexander Wolfe on October 12, 2009

As another umbrella technology which is attempting to integrate ease-of-use and transparency on top of an incredibly diverse collection of services, unified communications is a worthy effort. A new report, which says the overall enterprise UC market will generate $7.8 billion in revenues in 2010, sheds interesting light on the relative strengths and positioning of Cisco and Microsoft. Here are some salient excerpts.

First, a quick look at the numbers. The report, from Insight Research Corp., is entitled "The Global Market for Unified Communications: Software, Services, and Solutions 2009-2014, forecasts that the market will grow at compound annual rate of 38.7 percent, rising from an estimated $5.3 billion this year to $27.3 billion in 2014.

Some of those numbers were contained in an Insight Research press release, which teased the report. But I was really more interested in hearing what it had to say about some of the major players. I apologize for leaving out Avaya, which has a UC intro today, but for the purposes of this blog, I'm going to present to you some quick insights into Cisco (which recently acquired Tandberg) and Microsoft. I thank Insight Research's president, Robert Rosenberg, for allowing me to quote from his report.

In terms of positioning, the report says that Microsoft and Cisco have contrasting approaches to UC.  Cisco's is characterized as network-centric, while Microsoft is seen as taking an application-centric tack.

Notes the report: