Cisco vs. Microsoft Lync on Enterprise Collaboration

Cisco Systems, Inc. underscores what the company sees as the inherent weaknesses of its rival Microsoft Lync's multi-vendor hardware strategy for enterprise collaboration. Cisco points these out, through corporate blog posts, on February 18, the eve of Microsoft Lync's Conference 2013.

Cisco wields the results of the global survey-study it commissioned from Redshift Research. The respondents of the said survey were composed of 3,320 IT leaders from nine countries. However, a different number (3,200) was reported in this Cisco corporate blog post.

Seventy-two percent of the respondents said that a Windows-first strategy would result to "at least some negative impact on the... business" because that approach would impede flexibility of communication using other devices, most especially the service quality on mobile devices powered by iOS and Android.

Eighty percent of the IT leaders surveyed also said that they are looking forward to cloud-based voice and video equipped "with features and quality on par with what's offered on premises." Cisco then sets out to criticize Microsoft's cloud strategy by hinting on the feature parity between Microsoft Lync and Lync Online, its cloud-based counterpart.

Forty-seven percent of the respondents who deployed Lync in their organization said that they do not use it for business-critical outside communications. Moreover, 77 percent of the IT leaders surveyed said that they keep "a proven communications system for their most important communications."

Eighty-seven percent of IT leaders surveyed preferred single-point accountability, and 78 percent said that the lack of single-point accountability could negatively affect productivity or revenue.

"Cisco believes customers should seek vendors who can provide that single point of accountability," said Carl Wiese, senior vice president and head of Global Collaboration Sales at Cisco. "From our vantage point, Microsoft's multi-vendor approach involves a patch quilt of vendors, and finding out "who's on first?" when support is needed can be like finding a needle in a haystack. This can result in increased costs and reduced productivity for customers as they try to figure out how to troubleshoot and resolve problems across many different technology vendors.

Another criticism to Microsoft's enterprise collaboration portfolio was proffered by Rowan Trollope, senior vice president and general manager of Collaboration Technology Group at Cisco. Trollope said that the modern collaboration platform has to go beyond the basics. It must be flexible and able to support trends like BYOD, high-quality video, and various forms of cloud deployments, such as private, public, hybrid, and hosted. "Which brings me back to Microsoft and Lync," Trollope said. "We believe that a solution that's primarily been developed for a desktop PC user experience is less able to meet these wider post-PC requirements than one that has been designed and optimized for them from the outset."

Forrester Research analyst Art Schoeller was not persuaded by Trollope's claim of Lync being rendered more expensive and complicated by the need to get hold of phones, video and voice equipment, gateways, and networking gear from hardware makers since, unlike Cisco which integrates its hardware and software, Microsoft does not manufacture such hardware. "Each account is different in what they have, what they want, and what capabilities are important to them and what model appeals to them more," Schoeller said.

Channelnomics' Dave Courbanou, weighing in on the series of offensives by Cisco officials, said: "In truth, Cisco isn't entirely wrong, but it is a bit disingenuous on some of its its [sic] assertions." Courbanou acknowledged that competition could, indeed, turn ugly, and that negative campaigning was also a Microsoft tactic, as exemplified by Microsoft's Scroogled.com attacking Google's privacy policy.

Over at Network World, Zeus Kerravala outlined several UC aspects and explained what he saw as the performance of Cisco and Microsoft at each point. "The real battle between the two will be for presence," Kerravala concluded, "and this is key because ownership is key to building communications enabled applications."

Kevin Kieller also wrote about the Cisco-Microsoft schism on how enterprise collaboration should be.

Microsoft has not directly addressed Cisco's corporate blog posts.

Meanwhile, Microsoft scores with Lync-powered Polycom IP phones being included in the GSA Schedule. Also noteworthy is the company's announcement of a $617M-deal with the U.S. Department of Defense by one of its partners early this year. On the other hand, Cisco recently announced its small-cell hardware and software designed for hybrid wireless networks. The company also enhanced its UC application and presented its new enterprise-grade collaboration tools and midmarket-specific collaboration programs. (KOM) Link. Link. Link. Link. Link.