Microsoft enters IP PBX market

By Stuart Corner
Wednesday, 21 March 2007 06:44

Technology

As iTWire has been predicting, Microsoft has unveiled an IP phone system for small businesses, with a voice activated user interface. It will be OEMed by D-Link, Quanta and Uniden, initially.

The move will put the company in head on competition with the leading IP PBX vendors such as Cisco, Avaya and Nortel with whom Microsoft has been collaborating to integrate its unified communications tools with their products.

Code named 'Response Point', the product is presently in beta testing and will be generally available later this year as an OEM product. It supports both VoIP and traditional analogue phone lines, and includes a voice-activated user interface. It will be launched commercially as the D-Link DVX-2000, Quanta Syspine and Uniden Evolo.

The product was announced at Microsoft's annual small business summit by Microsoft COO Kevin Turner who said: " 20 years ago Bill Gates had a vision for our company which said, look, I want a PC on every desk and in every home... Now, his new vision for Microsoft is we need to be that uniquely positioned company in the marketplace that can connect the digital lifestyle and the digital work style. And that's the vision and aspiration for our company. And no better customer segment, again, fits that than the small business owners. And that's what we're working hard on.

At the announcement Turner played a video in which the first beta customer of the phone, Mark McCracken, CEO of Comenity, w interviewed on it by Gates. The video and more information on Response Point are available here.

Microsoft says it has designed the Response Point software to empower small-business customers to manage system changes themselves. - via a "user-friendly" PC-based management console. tasks such as adding a phone for a new employee or creating a call distribution list can be completed in a couple of minutes.

Response Point features include: Phone and service configuration wizards; Phone auto discovery; One-touch voice commands; Automated Receptionist; Built in voicemail; Voicemail to e-mail forwarding; Incoming call notifications on PC; Microsoft Outlook contact integration; Two-click backup and restore.

Response Point phone systems will come complete with a base unit, voicemail, software and desktop phones. Microsoft says that users will have access to as many features as you like and will be able add phones or extensions without paying additional licensing fees. Microsoft has given no information on system capacity: no of lines and extensions supported, no of voice mail boxes etc.

In addition to Response Point, Microsoft is offering an extensible, software-based VoIP foundation through Office Communications Server 2007 and Office Communicator 2007. Microsoft will distribute the public beta versions of Communications Server 2007 and Communicator 2007 later this month. The Beta 2 release of Response Point is scheduled for early April.