Summertime is the time to mull.

Today I have the time to consider whether Microsoft and Nortel — currently unified communications (UC) partners — will move from heavy dating to marriage.

According to channel partners of both companies, rumors of such an acquisition have been swirling for some time. They say that while an acquisition is not apparent in the near term, none would be surprised to see it happen eventually. Read more »

Avaya appointed former Motorola channel executive Jeremy Butt to be its worldwide channel chief today. The appointment is the latest in a series of executive changes at the company in recent months.

Butt most recently served as vice president of worldwide channels for Motorola’s enterprise mobility business, and he is credited with greatly expanding the division’s channel reach globally. Read more »

If you’ve ever worked for a small company, you know how painful office telephony can be. Case in point: At my last gig, I inherited the desk and phone of another reporter who had left the company.

No one in that office knew how to change the voicemail options and phone calls to the telephony provider went unreturned for days. Finally I  had to call the reporter — now with a competitor — and beg him for his password so that I could get into voice mail and change the configuration. Luckily, he was a mensch.

Sadly, that is not an exception to the rule when it comes to small businesses.

 Microsoft Response Point is supposed to remedy that situation by making it a no-brainer to move extensions around and reprogram options. 

This week, the company will tout Response Point Service Pack 1 that will  add outward-facing VoIP capabilities to the year-old small business phone system.  

The full Response Point system – Microsoft software bundled with D-Link, Quantas or Aastra hardware — plugs into a company’s LAN and from that point promises easy and flexible phone management.

It can work with traditional analog or VoIP lines or a combination, says Jason Harrison, president of Harrison Technology Consulting, a Nashville, N.C.-based small business specialist. Harrison’s been a fan since the inaugural release.

Microsoft will talk up SP 1 at its annual Small Business Summit this week. SP1 should be available as a download to existing customers and make its way into new hardware this summer.

The product competes with small business phone systems from Avaya, Digium and others.

One Microsoft talking point will be integration with Outlook email and Business Contact Manager. In theory, that will enable it to suck up all a user’s contact information and the user can then, click a button, speak the name of the client, and the system will place the call. It uses the company’s Speech Server technology.

The outbound-VoIP capabilities means companies can easily assign new phone numbers (and discard them if needed.)  The previous release has internal VoIP capabilities and some partners say SP1 is adding features that had been promised in the initial release.

The target market is companies with up to 50 employees.  Harrison says the outbound VoIP-essentially direct SIP trunking is done within the server

“The fact that it works with VoIP and non-VoIP lines is a plus for smaller customers who may want to try out VoIP,” Harrison said. For his company the product opens up all sorts of telephony-oriented doors

“This is an area we haven’t been involved with before. This product lets customers try VoIP and add it as they want,” Harrison noted. 

He sees integration work opportunities with ResponsePoint, Outlook with Business Contact Manager, and Microsoft Office Accounting. With that amalgam a partner can create system in which an “inbound call prompts a popup toast that identifies the customer from caller ID, Outlook does a cross check, and you click on the toast to bring up all the data about that customer or prospect,” Harrison said.

The software also will give D-Link partners an entrée into voice applications.

Hardware/software solutions from all three partners list for about $2,500 for base unit and four or five desktop phones with slight variations depending on the OEM partner.

Barbara Darrow can be reached at bdarrow@techtarget.com.

What will be the defining partner issues of the coming year? Here’s a completely unscientific take on what solution providers of all stripes should watch for.

One: Will Dell’s new-found (or born again)  channel religion take? Can EqualLogic’s Don Bulens endow what partners see as Darth Vader with his good partner karma?

Two: Will VMware forestall the coming-from-everywhere virtualization onslaught? Current players like Citrix/Xensource are gunning for it as are VM newbies Oracle and Microsoft. If Microsoft stumbles with its Windows 2008/Hyper-V combo, VMware’s head start may prevail and its lock on enterprises continue. Should Hyper-V soar, Microsoft could be the go-to virtualization player at least in smaller companies and then it must wrestle with vexing licensing issues. How to adjust pricing when customers will have to buy fewer copies of the OS?

Three:  Will single-core, single-processor computers go the way of the buggy whip and the Edsel? Could be.

Four: Can/will Google transform itself into a power within the firewall? It’s using its appliance and apps as Trojan horses but will IT really tolerate this consumer-led push? Can it afford not to?

Five: Conversely, can Microsoft transform itself into a software-as-a-service power? Microsoft, unlike Google, has to defend its on-premise turf. Will it figure out how to bring its partners along for the ride? Or throw them under the bus?

Six: Can Hewlett Packard beat back Dell’s new partner efforts to build on its hardware dominance? Will HP partners defect?

Seven: Can Microsoft regroup from its  under delivered Vista? Will SP 1 re-invigorate the market, spur “killer app” development? Or will Redmond simply declare victory and start hyping the next release?

Eight: Will computer retail survive/prosper? Was  CompUSA’s demise a sign of things to come in retail consolidation or just a specific case of mismanagement and missed opportunities?

Nine: Will the iPhone parlay its blockbusting consumer popularity into the enterprise? Will it “work well with others” as in existing  corporate e-mail and other systems? Or will the corporate classes cling to their Blackberries?

Ten: Will Microsoft sort out its self-hosted ERP puzzle? The company wants to offer hosted options for its apps but so far has been publicly mum on what could be called “ERP Live.” Maybe it can’t figure out which of its four (count ‘em, four!) ERP lines should be the underlying code base?

Bonus item: Who will win the unified communications marathon? Networking powerhouse Cisco or application dominator Microsoft? Or could there be a dark horse?

Barbara Darrow, a Boston-area reporter, can be reached at badarrow@comcast.net. 

Want to sell some a unified communications solution, skip the tech guys and start with the sales department.

Yes, yes, the idea that business executives will wield a larger decision over technology purchases has been kicking around the channel for several years now. But Mike Thompson, president and CEO of VAR Groupware Technology in Campbell, Calif., says the most relevant sales conversations are starting to happen outside of the IT organization. This is especially true for complex solutions such as unified communications, he says, because the easiest way to justify the investment cost is to talk to those who own or manage operational and facilities costs that fall outside the IT organization.

Of course, this means a different sort of marketing message, Thompson says. He’s investing in a multi-tiered one for unified communications that leans less on the tech specs of the Cisco equipment he sells and more on the tangible business benefits. One of the biggest head turners, he says, is the simple efficiency argument—especially when it comes to linking together organizations with several remote locations that want to look more professional.

Business journalist and channel communications consultant Heather Clancy welcomes your comments, ideas and gripes. E-mail her at hccollins@mac.com.

Cisco Systems Inc. has shopped successfully for a set of tools that can help its wireless customers clean up the interference and improve the efficiency of their networks.

Cisco announced today that it has agreed to acquire Cognio Inc., which makes spectrum analysis products designed to identify, locate and eliminate sources of radio-frequency interference that can do to a wireless network the same thing that high-power lines do to reception on an AM radio.

Read more »

By Barbara Darrow

Never one to let an event go by without putting in its two cents, Microsoft said at VoiceCon today that six companies, including Intel, LG-Nortel, Polycom and Texas Instruments, are licensing its RT Audio Codec for use in their audio conferencing, gaming and wireless-over-IP wares.

The company also said it will officially launch its Office Live Communications Server 2007 on Oct.16 with Bill Gates and Jeff Raikes sharing the keynote honors.

This product — which melds VoIP, instant messaging and Web conferencing — represents a heightened rivalry with Cisco. Yesterday, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and Cisco CEO John Chambers talked up the need for their two companies to work well with others. Including each other. Interesting that they chose to make this disclosure the same day they chatted very publicly with PBS’ Charlie Rose.

But the fact that both companies will offer the same functionality means that partners with limited resources may feel the need to align with one or the other.

Given the huge reach of Microsoft and Cisco, it’s inevitable that the two would end up facing off. As a slew of Microsoft execs said at the company’s worldwide partner conference, the company will compete strongly with rivals where it can win business, but when the customer opts for a rival product, it must also promise — and deliver — good citizenship (e.g., interoperability with other wares in mixed environments). Thus, as always, parts of Microsoft compete with SAP, Oracle, Sony, IBM, insert-your-company-of-choice-or-the-free-and-open-software-movement here, while other parts of Microsoft will woo and support them.

Barbara Darrow, a Boston-area journalist, can be reached at badarrow@comcast.net.

A recent press release from California-based Meru Networks announced the mobile and wireless networking vendor’s newly enhanced partner program. According to the release, the new partner program “is designed to enabled and reward partners for the value they add in helping customers address business critical wireless challenges.” To catch the value-added reseller’s (VAR’s) attention, though, they promise “financial incentives and simplified program requirements”.

Apparently, Meru is attempting to make their partners’ jobs of selling their products easier. One of the larger changes to the vendor’s partner program is the offering of free software downloads and discounts on products so that VARs will have the latest releases and versions of Meru’s products to demonstrate to potential customers.

With these changes and fortifications to their partner program, Meru is joining a growing number of networking vendors who are recognizing the importance of their resellers and partners, and doing their best to meet those partners’ needs. For more information on their partner program, contact Meru.

~Eric Pierce

Cisco Systems Inc. is making the rounds of press outlets with NDA briefings on its new partnership with Salesforce.com, so most of it is hush-hush (actually all Cisco has said about it is that it will be announcing a hookup).

But the tool itself has already appeared — on April 20. It’s listed as the third-most-downloaded telephony integration app on Salesforce.com’s AppExchange site: the Cisco Unified CallConnector for Salesforce.com.  (An embarassed Cisco PR guy said the page would be pulled down by the time you read this, but we made sure to make a copy of the data sheet (cisco-salesforce-callconnector.pdf).

It’s also listed on Cisco’s own page listing products with which its Unified CallConnector will integrate. Cisco’s version is a lot more subtle, tho. The link just relaunches the page of other CallConnector versions. Read more »

One of the snags in VoIP installations is how to extend them to small branch offices or home offices (which are getting more common in all industries that rely on knowledge workers). According to IDC, VoIP is growing faster in home offices than in corporate offices.

 Connecting a corporate VoIP network across the Internet, to a home office or a hotel (once it’s outside the firewall, does it really matter from where a remote worker is connecting?) so telecommuters and travelling employees can connect with it is daunting. It’s hard enough (and expensive enough) to get acceptable VoIP performance in a corporate setting.

 Cisco is offering some corporate/home VoIP configuration guidance, in a document, in a paper that — judging by the rule that the usefulness of any technical document rises in direct proportion to the awkwardness with which it’s written — is very useful indeed: PIX/ASA 7.x: QoS for VoIP Traffic on VPN Tunnels Configuration Example

(Here’s some advice on how to set up a comfortable and productive home office, btw.)