The Xbox 360 is great. And with Kinect it’s phenomenal. But for Microsoft Chief Research and Strategy Officer Craig Mundie to dismiss Apple Siri and brag about Tellme in Windows smartphones?

Utter embarrassment, especially coming from an executive who’s supposed to be the technology visionary of the company. (Heck, we all know Ballmer isn’t the guy.)

Tellme was rumored to have cost $800 million in 2007, but has the technology been stuck in the past?

It’s now evident that the software giant does not consider speech technology important and will likely pay a price for it, much like when it played catch-up during the Web boom. While Microsoft wasn’t looking, Nuance had scooped up dozens of other companies and partnered with Apple to give Siri a voice in the cloud.

And now the blogosphere is abuzz with this:

What does Tellme tell you?

Microsoft’s Office Communicator evolved into Lync and has gained traction in competing against other UC products. Considering that Microsoft is a software company and not a communications firm, it’s quite an impressive feat. Lync was one of the most anticipated UC products at Enterprise Connect 2011, and the keynote presentation was one of the most well received.

At my workplace a group of us are Lync users. I love it. It has a clean interface and not excessively featured (ahem, Office), it does a great job with chat and VOIP communications. I also enjoy the ability to easily set up multi-endpoint ringing, transferring to another device mid-conversation, and simple drag-and-drop for conferencing. What a great business tool.

Back then, in March 2011, Microsoft semi-promised a Lync client for all the major mobile platforms: iOS, Android, BlackBerry, Windows Phone 7, and Symbian. The plan was to release them before the end of the year.

Well, it’s almost December. Will Microsoft make good on this promise?

Yes, according to a tweet by Microsoft Australia. Within “the next four weeks.” (The tweet has since been removed.)

Most consumers probably won’t care about the release of mobile Lync clients, but for a lot of businesses that deployed Lync and have a workforce tethered to the various smartphones out there, this is welcomed news and could certainly boost productivity. More importantly, it’d truly demonstrate Microsoft’s commitment to unified communication.

(h/t BGR)

Last week Gartner came out with its latest Magic Quadrant for UC. So how do things look in the cutting edge field of unified communications?

Well, it appears that everyone is either a leader or niche player.

The vendors deemed worthy enough to float on the upper-right leaders quad: Microsoft, Cisco, Avaya, Alcatel-Lucent, and Siemens Enterprise Communications.

Most of the others, designated as niche players by the ever politically correct Gartner (as opposed to “non-leaders,” “losers,” or “followers”?) in the lower-left quad, include some usual suspects like ShoreTel, Interactive Intelligence, TeleWare, Toshiba, and Aastra Technologies; but there were a couple of newbies this time: Digium and Huawei Technologies.

Between quadrants challengers (NEC and IBM) and visionaries (Mitel) were only three companies. Notice that the newcomers Digium and Huawei went straight to the niche quad instead of arriving as challengers or visionaries…

And to me that is tragic. Has the UC market place finally settled and its landscape defined?

With Microsoft leading the pack it’s clear that UC is an enterprise software application. Microsoft’s dominance in enterprise software is paying dividends in the adolescent UC market. Plus, its leadership further strengthened with the acquisition of Skype.

I wouldn’t have thought networking giant Cisco to be a close second. My #2 pick would’ve been IBM but alas, Big Blue has never quite figured out “communications” throughout its history.

Interestingly, Mitel is the only visionary in the report. The company has been making waves recently by making its products VM-friendly and exclusive — a “game changer,” according to Dave Michels of Pin Drop Soup:

Today at VMworld in Las Vegas, we learned of a new capability: virtual softphones! Mitel’s US desktop suite, UC-Advanced, includes a softphone (and presence, and IM), and it is now supported on VMware’s View virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). To my knowledge, this is the first time a softphone is truly being supported on a virtual desktop. This is a game changer.

…

So far, this is a Mitel (MCD) and VMware (View 5) exclusive. The companies have not disclosed the secret sauce that makes it work, but it will no doubt be coming to other vendors. VDI is hot! It drives down support and hardware costs while improving mobility. Allowing a softphone to tag along has huge implications, particularly for organizations embracing cloud services. Virtual desktops have the potential to turn all kinds of form factors into legitimate, secure workstations including PCs, thin client desktops, iPads, and ChromeBooks.

Thanks to Eric Krapf over at the No Jitter blog, we learn a bit about the “secret sauce“:

“In the VDI space, the reason why the math works so well is you don’t have a PC for every person in the datacenter; you oversubscribe the resource,” because you don’t have everyone using all their resources all the time, [Mitel CTO Jim Davies] explained. So “even if you solve the latency problem, which is solvable, you still have the math problem.”

Rewriting the softphone application enabled Mitel to solve the latency problem; VMWare created an API for View that lets the Mitel softphone’s media streaming function plug into the thin client on the desktop, while the remaining functions move to the datacenter.

What will the next UC Magic Quadrant look like? I hope to see more dots in the top-left and bottom-right quadrants.

Have you ever been to Interspeech, the annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association, held in beautiful Florence, Italy?

And you call yourself a hardcore speech technology nut?! Tell me if these PDFs make sense to you.

Well, it’s good to know that while some companies are busy buying up smaller competitors, there are brainiacs all over the world who actually fawn over speech recognition. Let’s thank Microsoft for pouring billions of dollars into its Research arms (yes, it has R&D facilities around the globe) so that we may one day face a Terminator who won’t mix up “Go fetch me a beer!” with “Gopher meets a deer!” and blow us into pieces because it thinks we are too dumb.

Microsoft researchers are improving large vocabulary speech recognition by enhancing neural network models of “senones” (so cutting edge that even Wikipedia doesn’t offer an explanation):

Earlier work on DNNs had used phonemes. The research took a leap forward when Yu, after discussions with principal researcher Li Deng and Alex Acero, principal researcher and manager of the Speech group, proposed modeling the thousands of senones, much smaller acoustic-model building blocks, directly with DNNs. The resulting paper, Context-Dependent Pre-trained Deep Neural Networks for Large Vocabulary Speech Recognition by Dahl, Yu, Deng, and Acero, describes the first hybrid context-dependent DNN-HMM (CD-DNN-HMM) model applied successfully to large-vocabulary speech-recognition problems.

“Others have tried context-dependent ANN models,” Yu observes, “using different architectural approaches that did not perform as well. It was an amazing moment when we suddenly saw a big jump in accuracy when working on voice-based Internet search. We realized that by modeling senones directly using DNNs, we had managed to outperform state-of-the-art conventional CD-GMM-HMM large-vocabulary speech-recognition systems by a relative error reduction of more than 16 percent. This is extremely significant when you consider that speech recognition has been an active research area for more than five decades.”

Kudos, Microsoft. We cannot wait to see this breakthrough commercialized because, Lord knows, you could use some help:

(h/t Jason Hersh)

I wasn’t able to attend SpeechTEK NYC this year, but here’s what I gathered based on a couple of on-site sources and my own digging…

• Thumbs down on the first keynote speech, “Responding to the Voice of the Constituent/Customer” by David Gergen. Inviting a senior political analyst from CNN to open an event tailored to speech tech may not have been the best idea. Echoing throughout the conference were comments such as “Ten minutes of useful information with 40 minutes of fluff.” (Sounds like CNN…)
• Nuance Dragon Go! was a hit. This mobile app for the Apple iOS was released in mid-July and combines Nuance’s Dragon voice recognition engine with natural language understanding to deliver the most relevant content based on a user’s voice query.
• Microsoft Xbox with Kinect crashed. From what I’ve been told, it crashed “a few times” during the Microsoft Tellme VIP Event. Attendees got to witness what a core dump on a projection screen looks like. (Not good.)
• Vendors continue to push cloud and voice biometrics. Everybody’s still talking about the cloud. It’s here and it’s here to stay. Companies are utilizing it, and cloud vendors are making money from it. Get ready for the next big thing: voice biometrics.
• Interactions, Inc. — the best IVR nobody’s heard of? This Boston-based company just secured $12 million in new funding. Check out their online demos. Almost too good to be true?
• Smaller venue, less attendees, less tweets. Is the economy taking a toll on the industry?

So it’s official: Skype did not end up in Google or Facebook’s embrace; it now belongs to Microsoft, as CEO Tony Bates wrote on its blog.

I was hoping to see Skype go through with its IPO later this year as a master of its own destiny. A great company with a time-tested product, now we’re left wondering how Skype would’ve fared independently.

There’s a lot of techno-analyses on this $8.5 billion deal — the largest acquisition made by Microsoft. Will Live Messenger survive? Will Skype end up in Lync? Will Microsoft continue to support Skype on non-MS platforms (e.g. Mac, Linux, iOS, Android, etc.)? With this acquisition there will be many overlapping products, but Microsoft scores with owning Skype intellectual properties, especially in peer-to-peer communications — something quite useful for Microsoft’s cloud initiatives.

Some have questioned whether Skype itself will survive under the Redmond Giant, taking a page from history about the former glory days of Hotmail. Yahoo Mail and Gmail have pushed Hotmail into the preferred email service to receive spam and unwanted newsletters. Let’s hope Skype doesn’t end up in a similar fate as Hotmail.

My real question, however, is to CEO Tony Bates: What happened? Was the IPO pressure too great and the investors insisted on selling? They had the most to gain from the $8.5 billion sale in cold, hard Microsoft cash. According to GigaOm:

• Using the $8.5 billion price as the likely sale price, eBay gets $2.55 billion for its 30 percent stake in Skype. So in the end, eBay did make money on the Skype deal.
• Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, the co-founders with their 14-percent stake, take home about $1.19 billion. Damn, these guys know how to double dip!
• Silver Lake, Andreessen Horowitz and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB) own 56 percent of the company and that stake is worth $4.76 billion.
• Andreessen Horowitz had 3 percent of the deal and made $205 million profit on their $50 million initial investment.

I would think that Bates would’ve wanted to stay independent instead of getting sold. After all, he was formerly with Cisco and headed the enterprise groups, responsible for 80 percent of Cisco’s business and profits. Why would he leave the Cisco bureaucracy in hopes to enter another gigantic bureaucratic organization? He was thriving at the helm of Skype. Instead of reporting to John Chambers, now he’ll report to Steve Ballmer. Good luck with that.

To Microsoft: I don’t want to see a BSoD when I’m on Skype video with somebody, okay? Thanks.

For more photos and videos of Microsoft at Enterprise Connect 2011 please visit the album on Facebook.

Microsoft made waves at last year’s VoiceCon because it was such a newbie in the voice business. It grabbed lots of headlines in 2010 with its Lync (formerly codenamed “14″) release. The Redmond Giant was the company many other exhibitors love to hate. Who can blame them? Nobody — certainly not the Avayas and Siemens of the world — would’ve thought a software company becoming a considerable threat in their telecom market. That’s why it’s always a treat to see Microsoft’s keynote.

Kirk Koenigsbauer, Corporate VP Office Business Productivity Group, had the honor to keynote at Enterprise Connect. As expected the keynote centered around Microsoft Lync and its capabilities (of course, with the obligatory kick-off video filled with scenes similar to Minority Report technology). But a few things really stood out with this year’s presentation.

First, Koenigsbauer’s role at Microsoft encompasses a spectrum of products: Exchange, SharePoint, Lync, etc. It’s very likely that this man determined how you did your work in the office today and everyday. One of the main selling points of Lync is the tight and seamless integration with all the other Microsoft software that’s prominent in the workplace.

Second, during the demo Koenigsbauer and his team had set up a Kinect game console for use with Lync. The Kinect was hooked up to the widescreen TV, and using VideoKinect he was able to conduct a Lync video conference. The Kinect’s one of the company’s best selling hardware and sort of one-upped Nintendo’s Wii in the whole motion-detection game market. But the VideoKinect demo was very intriguing because it can be the teleworker’s telepresence setup. With all the talk about the consumerization of IT, here was Microsoft bravely treading the water to embrace and leverage the success of Kinect in a business video use case.

Lookin' good, my VideoKinect'd colleague...

Third, the company is coming out with the iLync client for the Apple iOS platform and plans to support all the major mobile platforms going forward — Nokia Symbian, RIM BlackBerry, Google Android, and Windows Phone 7 — possibly all by the end of this year. The demo with an iPhone went smoothly, but I thought Koenigsbauer should’ve gone with a WP7 first then perhaps with an iPhone. Many folks disagreed with me on this, however, and thought that I was being too anti-Microsoft. I know I’m an Apple fanboy, but my thinking was more about Microsoft’s marketing and branding. I applaud Microsoft for supporting other mobile platforms and this demo got that message across, but from a marketing presentation standpoint, imagine an even stronger message had the demo started off with iLync on WP7. That would’ve reinforced Microsoft’s commitment to WP7 as a powerful prosumer smartphone in light of all the negative publicity about the WP7′s lackluster sales. Some audience members may even have considered WP7 then if they’re on the fence about getting the next smartphone. And to top it off after a WP7 show and tell — sort of like a Jobs-ique “One more thing” — demo iLync on the iPhone. The crowd would’ve gone wild.

“Release the Kraken!” exclaimed Zeus in Clash of the Titans. The people of Argos angered the gods and needed to sacrifice Andromeda to Kraken or face annihilation.

With Microsoft’s release of the eagerly anticipated Lync it is looking to be a clash of the UC titans indeed. Cisco and Avaya are certainly not thrilled. Their UC solutions may sit in many enterprises, but most of the workers probably spend more time in Outlook, Word, and Excel than on the desk phone (ugh) or softphone.

Microsoft is the slow giant that doesn’t die — it just trips and fumbles, but always gets back up. Windows is still around. Internet Explorer is still around. Office is still around. Windows Mobile rose from the ashes as Windows Phone 7. OCS evolved into Lync.

The Redmond Giant has enormous resources to leverage. People, money, brand recognition, etc. Just imagine the outcome of bundling Lync with another MS product…

There’s no shortage of partners jumping onto the Lync bandwagon: Aspect (of course), Interactive Intelligence, and even Dialogic. The list is way longer — trust me.

Lync will be pushed very aggressively by the company. The ultimate goal is to convince you to ditch that PBX and replace it with Lync instead. No need for telecom staff. It’s just another server to be administered by the IT guy. And it’ll work seamlessly with your existing Office products. Promise.

A roundup of reports are mostly giving Lync 2010 a thumbs up. You can find them using Google.

…speaking of Google. Didn’t it have plans to invade the enterprise UC&C market?

Count on it. The clash of the titans is between Microsoft and Big G. Forget that I had mentioned Cisco and Avaya. (For some reason they are too fixated on video tablets…)

(Press) release the Lync:

REDMOND, Wash. — Nov. 17, 2010 — Microsoft Corp. today announced the general availability of Microsoft Lync, the next generation of communications that connects people in new ways. Starting today, anyone can download a free trial version of Lync at http://www.lync.com, and business customers can purchase Lync beginning Dec. 1.

Lync is a single platform that integrates instant messaging, presence, audio, video, webconferencing and voice to bring people together in the ways they communicate best, with one interface that works with the applications businesses know and use today, including Microsoft Office, Microsoft SharePoint and Microsoft Exchange.

“Lync delivers on our vision to unify all of the modes of modern business communication, giving people a more collaborative, ‘in person’ experience with features like HD video, conference recording, and social features like status updates and activity feeds,” said Gurdeep Singh Pall, corporate vice president of the Microsoft Lync & Speech Group. “In addition to transforming how people communicate, IT departments are also looking to Lync to evolve their infrastructure and enhance or eliminate their traditional PBX systems, saving money and saving time.”

Customers including The Estee Lauder Companies Inc., Nikon Corp., Marquette University, France Telecom and Herrenknecht AG are deploying Lync 2010 to change the way they communicate, and transforming their businesses while saving money.

Nikon, for example, uses Lync with SharePoint and Exchange to increase the company’s employee productivity. To date, Nikon has experienced a 30 percent increase in productivity in some areas.

“We want to move away from relying on a specific communication tool, like e-mail,” said Michiko Noborisaka, general manager of Information System Planning Department at Nikon Corp. “We need capabilities that free people from the constraints of time and place. Our employees should be able to choose the best communications tools for each scenario they face.”

Microsoft recently commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a Total Economic Impact study that found that for a composite organization Lync 2010 offers a risk-adjusted ROI of 337 percent, including $6.35 million in hard cost savings over three years, with a payback period of 12 months.

Choice and Value With Partner Solutions

Today, more than 70 new devices optimized for Lync, including a variety of IP phones, headsets, speakerphones and webcams, are being announced by Polycom Inc., Aastra Technologies Ltd. and other device partners.

Polycom is announcing the industry’s first telepresence solution designed to interoperate with Lync, through the Polycom HDX Series and Polycom UC Intelligent Core. Both solutions enable individuals and groups to collaborate naturally and effortlessly across any distance.

“Through our commitment with Microsoft to deliver flexible standards-based solutions, Polycom is transforming business communications with the most comprehensive and intuitive communications experience that will deliver high-definition video, voice and content-sharing capabilities to conference rooms, classrooms and meeting spaces across the enterprise,” said Andy Miller, Polycom president and CEO.

In addition, more than 30 partners are launching applications on the Lync platform for public and private organizations of all types and sizes. Solutions include contact centers, call recording, accounting, performance monitoring services and new applications that embed communications within business processes. Partners include Aspect Software Inc., Convergent Media Systems Corp., ProtonMedia Inc. and Wortell.

Finally, several partners, such as British Telecom (BT), Dell, Dimension Data, HP and Verizon Business are offering services to help customers evaluate, deploy and manage their Lync infrastructure.

Product Availability

Microsoft Lync 2010 and Microsoft Lync Server 2010 will be available for businesses of all sizes to purchase on Dec. 1, 2010. Microsoft Lync Online will be available as part of Office 365, with voice capabilities available in 2011. Lync Online will include instant messaging, presence, audio and video conferencing, and PC-to-PC voice calls.

Microsoft Lync is the new family brand for the products formerly known as Microsoft Communications Server, Microsoft Office Communications Online and Microsoft Office Communicator, and now also includes Microsoft Lync Web App and Microsoft Lync Online. More information about Lync is athttp://www.microsoft.com/lync.

Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT”) is the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential.

Note to editors: For more information, news and perspectives from Microsoft, please visit the Microsoft News Center at http://www.microsoft.com/news. Web links, telephone numbers and titles were correct at time of publication, but may have changed. For additional assistance, journalists and analysts may contact Microsoft’s Rapid Response Team or other appropriate contacts listed athttp://www.microsoft.com/news/contactpr.mspx.

Microsoft Windows Phone 7 is finally unveiled. John Stepp, president of Free Tech Consultants, offers his take with this guest post on the Redmond Giant’s latest endeavor to shatter the Apple iOS-Android-Blackberry stronghold.

Now don’t get me wrong, I still love my NexusOne.  I am using the Voice Search feature all the time, a feature seemingly missing from Windows Phone 7.  But the new Windows Phone 7 is a very compelling feature rich mobile platform and will be successful in the market place for a number of reasons.  How big a success is up to question.  There is no question that out of the gate, AT&T and T-Mobile are big winners.

All the feature of Windows Phone 7 can be reviewed on their web site, but here are a few that I think make it a stand out product for Enterprise Communications:

1)    The Live Tiles that show messages, social media status, appointments, apps, etc.

2)    The Me Card that allows you to update your profile and picture across social media sites

3)    Office Mobile offers tight integration to Office apps including SharePoint.

4)    The obvious future tight integration with Microsoft Lync Server 2010

5)    The find my phone feature that will erase your phone remotely and give you a map to your phone

There are other great features, too, but many are for the consumer market.  So, to me, those that short change the Win Phone 7 announcement are missing the tremendous integration promise this operating system delivers now and promises in the future.  For enterprise Microsoft shops and those that will buy or upgrade to Lync for UC telephony services would be foolish not to look at Windows Phone 7 for their employees.

AT&T and T-Mobile are the big winners here and now.  T-Mobile gets the Win Phone 7 with the largest display (HTC HD7) to attract eyeballs to their web page and to their stores.  Now they have two state of the art phones with the Google Android G2.  AT&T has the widest variety of Win Phone 7’s to go along with the Apple iPhone 4 to get people flocking to them.  So, both of these carriers will get a substantial boost in traffic which will boost sales for all their products.

All in all, the Windows Phone 7 announcement is an exciting development for smart phone users.  It will change the playing field for Apple, Google, HP and RIM.  It will be interesting to see what competitive offerings develop in the future and what businesses end up doing with their mobile communications.  Please feel free to tweet any comments (I have a short attention span) to @freetechconsult.  I may or may not retweet them, but I will definitely reply.

Two major happenings this week with two major companies:

Microsoft finally got rid of the “14″ moniker and chose the brand name “Lync,” a marriage of “link” and “sync” to underscore its enterprise communications capabilities. The exact release date? Still TBD. The last half of 2010 proves t0 be eventful for the Redmond Giant with the release of Kinect and Windows 7, and putting on the final touches for Windows Phone 7 (including a mock iPhone funeral), as well as offering the beta of Internet Explorer 9. So I guess I won’t be too surprised if Lync doesn’t come out until early 2011.

Avaya had something up its sleeve and it’s a $2,000 Android tablet, one component of what it brands the Flare Experience. Interestingly, Avaya avoided using “tablet” to describe anything within the realm of Flare. Obviously it wanted to distance itself as an Apple competitor or copycat. No matter, the iPad is still the tablet king, and any device that comes out to market without a keyboard will be compared to the iPad. It happened with the Cisco Cius and it will happen with the Avaya Flare tablet. How these enterprise focused tablets fare in the workplace remains to be seen…

Avaya also made the headlines by being the leader in global PBX market share. It bests Cisco by 3% with help from the $475 Nortel acquisition.

Other than company news, a guest post titled “Four simple rules for new technology evaluation” offered great practical advice on embracing a new technology for the enterprise. What stood out for me was Rule #1 — Buy early in the product life cycle. Most of the time we’re advised to avoid being the guinea pigs and field testers. “Let’s wait until the dot-five release” is something often overheard at management meetings. But from a cost standpoint this makes a lot of sense. The important thing is to keep expectations grounded in reality and perform as much due diligence as possible in finding and dealing with the technology vendor.