Congratulations are in order for Anoop Gupta. You see, Anoop just became the new VP of Microsoft’s newly created Unified Communications Group. According to the press release, the Unified Communications Group will be created from the merger of the Exchange Group, and the Real Time Communications Group.
I’ve seen Anoop, and members of his team, speak several times. They’ve had a strong Unified Communications vision, and now, with assets like Exchange part of the organization, they will be able to really execute on that vision. The logic of combining the company’s message store with the Real Time Communications group is irrefutable.
The next really interesting step will be to see how they provide hosted versions of new offerings based on this technology merger. Scalable, hosted versions of these popular apps would be the killer VoIP offering for small and medium enterprise.
Alec Saunders is the Vice President of Developer Relations for BlackBerry make Research in Motion. This is his personal blog, with his personal viewpoints. Prior to this Alec was the CEO and co-founder of Calliflower — the easiest way to hold a meeting, online, on a conference call, or on the go. A double-decade veteran of product management and marketing, he spent nine years at Microsoft where he helped launch Windows 95, the first two versions of Internet Explorer, the Universal Plug and Play initiative, the push into home markets, opt-in email marketing and what might well go down in history as the very first direct email list ever.
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VAR’s have been screaming for this for 10 years. Is this going to cannibalize the existing ecosystem of developers that have basically led the parade in UM solutions for Microsoft, are they going to work with solutions from companies like Captaris and Avaya? or replace them? and say thanks for the help…
Fax resources? PBX integrations? Many questions to be answered here. I think a few podcast interviews are in order to find out what the development community thinks of this move.