Where will software smarts end up?

Is Microsoft, infamous for the blue-screens of death on its Windows PCs, ready to enter the telephony world of SLAs and "five 9s" availability?

Whether the answer is yes or no, here they come anyway.

This week, the PC software giant delivered its first major salvo in the war over unified communications. The key new product: Office Communications Server 2007, which aims to do for VoIP and UC what Windows did for servers and laptops: deliver a cheap, developer-friendly platform that will suck telephony services -- and revenue -- into its commodity computing universe.

As we report in this news story, Microsoft is primarily competing with other enterprise IP voice companies, most notably Cisco but also Nortel, Avaya and others. They are also cooperating with those companies, too.

On the service provider side, the compete/cooperate equation is even trickier. Sure, there will be some competition, as carriers aim to deliver managed services to enterprise users. But that's arguably more about carriers invading the IT services market than vice versa.

What may be more interesting is exactly where the true software smarts end up in tomorrow's unified networks. Will it be at the desktop, or in software-based and fairly-distributed VoIP switches, as Microsoft would like? Will it be somewhere further up the network, but still behind the firewall, as Cisco hopes will happen? Or will the smarts settle in at the network cloud, with service providers delivering sophisticated next-generation network services?

The answer, of course, will always be a little of all three. But that doesn't make it a moot question. Microsoft isn't getting in the game to make pennies helping to terminate VoIP calls. It wants to own the enterprise customer experience in a world based on unified communications. So does Cisco (and Nortel and Avaya). And so do AT&T and Verizon and their managed services competitors.

Let the software games begin.

Editor's Note: Now that IPTV is real-world, learn how service providers are meeting the challenges of scalability, security and service differentiation at Telephony's IPTV Workshop, Oct. 29, in Boston, just before the VON trade show. Find more information and registration materials at telephonyonline.com/iptvworkshop/.

E-mail me at rkarpinski@telephonyonline.com.