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	TABLE OF CONTENTS Home Gateway To UC A New Level Of Unity New Media Matures Monday Morning Quarterback

Were you surprised when Google paid $1.65 billion for YouTube? To put it in perspective, the Space Shuttle Endeavour cost NASA $1.7 billion to build. Still, it's a smart buy. Google understands that success in the brave new world of user/community-driven content involves increased maturity in corporate blogs, wikis, podcasts and Webcasts, and more experimentation with video as a sales and marketing tool.

2007 SURVIVOR GUIDE INTRODUCTION BUSINESS STRATEGY SECURITY WIRELESS STORAGE & SERVERS MESSAGING & COLLABORATION APPLICATION INFRASTRUCTURE ENTERPRISE APPLICATIONS NETWORK MANAGEMENT NETWORK INFRASTRUCTURE

Meanwhile, 2007 will bring advances in enterprise e-mail, and VoIP adoption is finally picking up speed. Next stop: UC (Unified Communications) initiatives that link PBXs, IM and e-mail servers, mobile devices, contact-center applications, fax servers and more. Enterprises will use caution in adopting UC architectures, and rightly so. These systems are complex to set up; require skills that most IT staffs lack; and come with risks, mainly related to integration and ensuring reliability. We discuss many of these in "Handle With Care".

But the payoff can be great. It's difficult to calculate ROI based on efficiency improvements, but in a recent Forrester survey, 59 percent of knowledge workers estimated they would save two to five minutes per day, per contact, if they could automatically send messages based on the receiver's preferred communication channel, whether e-mail, IM, PDA, telephone, cell phone or pager. And 60 percent said they would save one hour or more per day if they could share documents and collaborate with their work teams in real time. At $38 per hour, that's $190 per work week, per employee.

Exchanging Messages

Use of instant messaging is on the rise in the enterprise, but e-mail is still king of the messaging hill, and Microsoft Exchange is the dominant player. Exchange owns about one in three desktops and is in growth mode, according to The Radicati Group, compared with a 20 percent (and shrinking) share for Lotus Notes, its closest competitor. With the exception of Vista/Longhorn, Exchange 2007 will be the most significant enterprise-class product Microsoft will release in the coming year. That makes us all the more intrigued by how tightly Microsoft will tie UC into Exchange: It will integrate with Office Communications Server 2007 to deliver e-mail, presence, IM and Web conferencing. Support for voice processing will let Exchange offer text-to-speech and speech-recognition capabilities. Mobile users can dial in to the corporate phone system, which then hands calls over to the UC role.

We're not ready to declare this a must-have upgrade, however. Support for Exchange 2003 will continue until 2010, and Exchange 2007 is a major architectural shift. For starters, it'll be supported in 64-bit mode only, and Microsoft has defined five roles--edge, hub transport, client access, mailbox and unified messaging--all in the name of scalability and security. Although the latter four roles can run on one server, the edge server must be a separate machine, and it cannot be part of the Windows domain. Not a bad idea, but not always simple to execute.

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Microsoft is also promising better antispam, antivirus and anti-spyware capabilities. Its ForeFront security suite, an add-on to Exchange 2007, scans and scrubs e-mail. Antigen, the current offering for protecting Exchange, OCS, and SharePoint, has been rebranded and moved into the ForeFront product line.

As for UC capabilities, just about the only thing Microsoft won't offer in Exchange 2007 is call termination; that will be handled through partnerships. Nortel has entered into a four-year deal with Microsoft that includes cross promotion, shared intellectual property and tighter product integration, to provide PBX functionality alongside Exchange and OCS. No surprise there. We didn't expect Microsoft to get into the hardware PBX market. But this partnership could negatively affect other UC vendors. Avaya, for example, must see this pact as a potential long-term threat, even as it maintains partnerships with Microsoft. Siemens likewise has products that are built on top of Microsoft's IM offering.

We see Microsoft hedging its bets and remaining open to other SIP-based VoIP systems going forward. Microsoft and Compaq made a similar deal in 1993, yet Dell seems to be doing well. From a technological perspective, the Microsoft-Nortel partnership doesn't offer much more than Alcatel, Avaya, Siemens or any other top-tier UC vendor offers. Nortel has had financial troubles for the past few years, so it may simply have offered Microsoft the best deal in hopes of taking back market share from Cisco, Avaya and others.

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