Forrester: - Making Leaders Successful Every Day

Microsoft's leading share in IM and email puts it in an excellent position to win a substantial share of the unified communications (UC) market. How will it differentiate? With a holistic product set delivering instant messaging, email, collaboration, voice, and video features — all with a wide array of device support. Competitors such as Cisco, Google, and IBM will pose threats to Microsoft with comparable feature sets, extensive delivery mechanisms, and robust interoperability. Microsoft can win customers in the market with its UC offerings so long as it delivers reliability and scalability, demonstrates the business value of a homogeneous Microsoft-branded UC solution, and satisfies users with its unique communications devices and software UC interfaces.