Cisco and Microsoft are getting ready to duke it out for the unified communications needs of medium to large enterprises (those with employees in the triple digits).
First came Microsoft’s announcement that it would be introducing new enterprise phone and conferencing features to Office 365, including the new bundle Office 365 E5, which packages Skype for Business with cloud-based security and analytics services. By bundling communications, security and analytics, Microsoft is directly defending itself against other productivity and communications rivals such as Google and, especially, Cisco.
About a week later, Cisco announced at its Collaboration Summit in San Francisco that it would be overhauling Spark, its online collaboration service. By adding IP voice and video calling via a cloud-based PBX, Spark has become a UC service. Coupled with its already popular Unified Communications Manager (UCM), the move shows that Cisco is doubling down on the UCC market for the coming year.
Which is important, because the UC market is poised to grow moving forward. From a recent article on Fool.com:
The global enterprise telephony and unified communications (UC) market generally isn’t considered a strong growth market. According to IHS Infonetics, total spending in the sector fell 4% annually last year to $8.7 billion. However, that slump masked 20% growth in the smaller UC applications segment, which consists of “unified” communications solutions like Microsoft’s Office-Skype bundle. Back in June, IHS reported that while Cisco and Avaya were the top enterprise telephony vendors, Microsoft dominated the UC market thanks to Windows’ massive enterprise presence.
So companies might not be spending on full-scale Unified Communications systems that will outfit every aspect of business, but they are spending on applications that will help to make communication easier. This is what Microsoft and Cisco are driving toward. Cisco has traditionally thrived through networking hardware, while Microsoft has leaned more on productivity software. With the introduction of these new and upgraded bundles and services, both companies are moving into the same UC space.
This is great news for the medium and large enterprise. While both companies look to grab hold of the same customers, they will be forced to offer discounts in order to compete with one another. As an enterprise, you can leverage this battle by demanding the best of both companies and choosing whichever works better for you. Before that, though, you can dangle the possibility of switching to the competitor in order to get the best price. The UC as a service field just turned into a buyer’s market.
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