Lync versus Jabber - How do you decide?

At Enterprise Connect I hosted a session entitled "Lync versus Jabber: How do you decide?" The session was incredibly well attended and had over 450 attendees. It is clear that for many organizations, deciding between the Lync client that comes with their enterprise Microsoft licenses or the free Jabber collaboration client that comes as an extension of their Cisco VoIP and video systems is a real challenge. With two strong political camps often backing each option and the complexity of deciding, many organizations are at a stand-still. And even when a decision is recommended, it is often challenged as subjective and biased.

At the session, PKE Consulting presented a quantitative model to enable teams to work through a comparison. This model uses 15 factors of organizational interoperability and TCO as the value inputs and then enables each vendor offer to be evaluated for each factor. Figure 1 shows the process that is built into this analysis model. For each factor, a weighting is established for both Knowledge and Information Workers. This is tailored to the needs of the organization.

Figure 2 shows the top level factors that are included in the analysis model. After inputting the weighting of the factors, the vendors are rated in each area as well.

The model then takes the data and generates quantitative comparisons with graphical outputs as shown in Figure 3. While the session included feedback from Jeremy Laurenson, Distinguished Systems Engineer of Cisco, and Taimoor Husain, Global Business Lead of Microsoft, that cannot be replicated, I wanted to extend an offer to the UCStrategies readers.

As part of the Enterprise Connect session, I offered the model to anyone attending free of charge. As a courtesy to the UCStrategies readers, I will make the same offer. If you send me an email at [email protected], I will forward you the model, along with linked PowerPoint presentations of the results, a detailed instruction sheet, some sample input data, and the presentation from Enterprise Connect.