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| Lync - Revenue exceeds $1Bn |
“In the crowded UC market, it (Lync) competes against offerings from vendors including Cisco, IBM, Avaya, Siemens, Alcatel-Lucent, Mitel and ShoreTel.
However, Lync isn't being hailed as a product that stands out from the rest in any significant way nor that is blazing trails of innovation in this UC market.”
I disagree, Lync does stand out from the rest in one very important and deal-making way; Lync is fully integrated with the more traditional Microsoft products, it embeds itself into Office, SharePoint and Exchange making Lync an extension of the existing business worker stack. It was designed from the outset to operate in this way, Microsoft intended the deep integration that Lync provides into existing workflows and indeed only they can achieve this as they produce all of the other software as well.
The competition developed its products to be competitors for traditional telephony, a separate isolated system, only producing the allusion of integration using applications such as CUCILync.
Lync is now Microsoft’s fastest growing business with 30% growth this year to exceed the billion dollar revenue mark.
There are also a billion registered users of Microsoft Office out there and Exchange is an immensely popular corporate e-mail platform; a large percentage of this user base will migrate from either old PBX systems or other VoIP systems onto Lync as the benefits to that coupling are great and enterprise licensing cost outlay is minimal. In addition if they are already using Office and Exchange then they are a Microsoft shop and likely to be in a position to adopt the technology faster and with better in-house support. Lync has a lot of growing to do and a lot of market cap to take.
Voice engineers I talk to accept that the products they work with are separate systems and are quite happy to keep developing these for their clients. They just don’t get it that voice has no future as a stand-alone product with its own dedicated infrastructure. Voice is already part of unified communications stacks and for a system to have a future it must provide all of the core communication modalities equally well with transition between IM, e-mail, voice, video and application / desktop sharing being as seamless as possible. Only Lync currently comes anywhere close to offering this.
Cisco rely on their rock solid reputation as justification to buy into their systems; telephony is mission critical so you must have the most reliable platform with its own dedicated everything.
But Lync is the only system thus far to pass the Miercom Sip torture test for reliability.
Zeus Kerravala, founder and principal analyst with ZK Research was quoted in the article referring to Lync, stating "It's a good, competitive, traditional UC tool." The most important thing is that Lync isn’t traditional, it’s ground breaking.
The significance of the Lync – Skype integration was skimmed over in the article. They mention that it will allow support teams to move into an era of customer partnership models, but Skype is also a readymade global VoIP network and it’s free. Almost all of us have devices that can run Skype; its user base is already huge giving Microsoft a distinct advantage in the UC market place and decisions as to which UC platform to migrate to, will in part depend on the answer to the question “is it compatible with our Skype customers?” Cisco realise this as a serious threat, hence the pending legal case between them.
See http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/05/28/cisco-microsoft-court-idUSL5N0E933220130528
It’s clear in this new UC landscape those clutching at the past and pushing products that see voice as a separate entity to be placed on the desk alongside the ubiquitous in-trays of the world will be relegated to history. Some very big players in the market today that initially claimed Lync as a non-threat will be pushed out of that market by the very same product.
The UC space may be crowded with products but saturation is still only at 51% globally and 90% of the fortune 100 already have Lync investment that is surely only going to grow as they retire more traditional systems many of which are listed among the competition. The big blow here for them will be the loss of those very lucrative support and maintenance contracts.
Microsoft have done a rare thing; produced a world beating product in a space where they have very little experience and in a comparatively short period of time.
Lync is going to be very big. Don’t believe me? Then check back here in two years and leave your comments then.
