posted by: Mark Cortner
The industry focus on the delivering cloud-based UC solutions continued to expand this week as Microsoft announced the commercial availability of its Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) in 20 countries worldwide. Microsoft’s BPOS is delivered via subscription services hosted by Microsoft and consists of Exchange Hosted Services, SharePoint Online, Exchange Online, Office Live Meeting, and Office Communications Online. BPOS utilizes global datacenters located in the USA, Dublin, Singapore, Amsterdam, and Hong Kong to deliver services to customers located in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, UK, and the USA.
With particular respect to UC, the Office Communications Online service includes business-class instant messaging (IM) and presence services, peer-to-peer voice and video services with integrated Office, Exchange, SharePoint user experiences. The service is delivered with a 99.9% service level agreement and boasts 9 levels of data security and is CyberTrust certified.
In addition to formally announcing the commercial availability of BPOS, Microsoft announced that it has signed a reseller agreement and a go-to-market agreement with EDS, an HP company. The announcement estimated the revenue potential for both companies to exceed $3B in cloud and professional services.
The initial market traction for these services will likely be small to mid-sized businesses, although the potential for enterprises to leverage the software-as-a-service (SaaS) model to augment premises-based UC platform strategies will appeal to many organizations and will factor into future service delivery strategies. The focus for cloud-based UC services today is on non-real time communications applications; how suites such as BPOS can integrate with enterprise telephony applications and how closely they can replicate the functional experience of premises-based platforms will determine their viability with large enterprise customers.
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