Microsoft lets slip OCS details

Microsoft has released early details ahead of its official launch of Office Communications Server this evening.

Bill Gates is due to officially launch OCS – Microsoft’s unified communications offering – in a conference call at 5.15pm.

In a presentation to press this afternoon at the IP’07 show in London’s Earls Court, Warren Barkley, program manager for unified communications at Microsoft, gave indications of the scale of his company’s proposition.

One hundred companies have been experimenting with the production version of Office Communications Server. These have been almost entirely large corporates, including BMW, Siemens, Audi and Shell, and they have an average of 97,000 employees, Barkley said.

Fifty partners are due to be revealed by Gates this evening, which includes device manufacturers and software integrators, among others.

200,000 users have downloaded trial versions of the software, Barkley added.

He drew attention to a so-called Magic Quadrant, produced by Gartner, which shows the leading vendors of unified communications, in the opinion of the analyst firm. Microsoft was one of the top three, along with Nortel and Alcatel-Lucent.

Microsoft also reached for some juicy quotes from analysts.

“The impact of unified communications will define the next decade of the comms and IT industry,” said IDC earlier this year.

Now that I can almost agree with.

ZDNet.co.uk has already reviewed Office Communications Server 2007.

Unified communications was the subject of a hotly contested debate at IP ’07 earlier today.