HP vs. Apple vs. RIM and Microsoft/Cisco Convergence: Battle for the Corporate Phone

I first started in tech with a PBX vendor, arguably the most advanced of its time. One of my positions there was as competitive analyst for phones, and I was able to use prototype devices that were vastly more advanced than anything anyone had ever seen.

Since then, I’ve been in major withdrawal, as these features and phones never made it to most desktops. Most folks are lucky if they can figure out how to do things like conference in a co-worker or transfer a call successfully.

This is a long way of saying the telephony industry doesn’t operate at “Internet speeds.” In fact, changes still seem to take decades — or at least did. That is about to change dramatically.

There are two types of convergence going on. The first is being largely driven by Microsoft, which is the only vendor possibly strong enough (and note I said possibly) to drive common standards across the telephony industry for user features. If it weren’t for Cisco, I’d lay odds it would fail, but Cisco is also a game-changer representing the greatest threat the legacy PBX vendors have faced since IBM, before it failed in this industry. And, unlike IBM, Cisco isn’t learning on the job and has what I believe to be the strongest enterprise VoIP solution in the segment.

The second is the convergence of cell and land-line phones. Northern Telecom tried and failed to do this more than a decade ago, but the technology wasn’t ready, and Northern didn’t have the breadth to make it work. With the surge on smartphones driven by RIM and Apple, coupled with the capability of HP, which just entered the segment with the strongest enterprise cell-phone line, the next step of converging PBX and cell services is closer than it has ever been.

Microsoft Background:

This is the fourth time Microsoft has made a run at phones. In the early ’90s there was a joke phone created by Microsoft Europe that floated around for a while. A consumer phone followed, one that depended on Windows 95 for features and was probably the worst telephone I’d ever seen in my life. After NT came out, a number of small PBX vendors used that platform in an embedded-like form and created what were the most reliable Windows Servers of their time (something that surprised most of us).

This is only to show that Microsoft’s experience here tracks back over a decade into both devices and switches, and while the results have been mixed, the company has an established knowledge base.

It’s also interesting that Microsoft itself used the cheapest and most limited phone systems in the market for much of its existence, and that likely motivated the company to create a solution that it could use that wasn’t so incredibly out-of-date. Sometimes self-interest is the best motivator.

It should be noted that Microsoft is hedging its bets by bringing out its own converged product in the SMB market, where technology change could happen more quickly. This is because systems in that market, called key systems, are even more antiquated than what many PBX enterprises use