UC Showdown: Cisco and Microsoft

There’s a showdown brewing between Microsoft and Cisco in the UC space. Both companies offer a lot of different products, some overlap and some don’t. I made a chart below to show where the products that do overlap stack up.

Note: I’m not making a judgment here as to whether or not the Cisco / Microsoft product is better – just how they align in the market space. Cisco Call Manager does many things better than OCS, and OCS does many things better than CCM or MeetingPlace.

Microsoft’s obvious strengths are a unified platform and a history of client/server software. Cisco’s obvious strengths are feature parity and product maturity.

So the showdown shapes up like this: Can Cisco unify its products and penetrate the client/server market before Microsoft has feature parity and gains market trust?

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If you believe that the future is based on a software-powered universe, you’d have to put your money on Microsoft. My gut instincts tell me that Cisco knows this as well, hence the acquisitions of PostPath, Jabber etc. They’ve had a good run of it as the king of the IP PBX, and all credit to Cisco for breaking those TDM/IP barriers. But it’s still hard for me to see Cisco as anything but a hardware company that has a software division. They make great hardware. They make a great IP PBX. And actually a lot of the components in the table above are good products. But it still strikes me as a hardware company thing to do: have many separate products with the same colored faceplate and the word "Unified" in the title.

You don’t see Microsoft doing much in the way of hardware acquisitions to keep up with Cisco, and nor should they. Microsoft will stick to what has made them champs: writing software. Yes, they need to add features to their software. But adding features is different than creating a new foundation for you product. Microsoft took a fundamentally different approach than Cisco from the start: a software-centric approach. It’s paying dividends for Microsoft and setting the table for the future.

One of the other major things MS has going for them is price. It’s not fair to Cisco to tally up all the licenses in the table above and compare it to an OCS ECAL, although that’s how you had to buy those products until recently. They’ve taken another cue from MS and unified the licensing.

To Cisco’s credit, they’ve changed the licensing structure so customers can buy the above products in a unified bundle (CUWL), so the pricing is much easier to swallow. Here’s how this breaks down:

*CUWL requires 3 years of maintenance @ $125 a year

This is all list price and subject to great variance, I’m sure. But MS has Cisco beat on pricepoint for all the features listed in my first table. When you factor in things like server pricing, server hardware and handsets, the scale keeps tipping towards MS.

So Cisco’s work is cut out: while the names and prices may be "unified" – the applications aren’t yet.

It’ll be a pretty big clash – that’s for sure. And you can never count Cisco out. But I think MS is better positioned to lead the way in the UC showdown.