Microsoft Acquires Media-Streams

Understanding “transitions” and its impact on worker productivity and team performance is often an over-looked aspect when people deploy tools to improve information sharing, communication and collaboration. By “transitions” I mean several things:

• a change in state
• the process of moving from one state to another
• how things are organized, packaged and transferred from one state to another
• the interval, frequency and reoccurrence of state changes over a period of time
• the meta data and other contextual information that holds the “storyline” together during and across transitions

If we looked at “a day in the life” of an average worker, our productive time is often disjointed. We move from a cell phone in a car to a land-line in the office. We move from an instant messaging conversation to a telephone call. We move from an e-mail conversation to a shared workspace. We move from PDA’s to laptops or PCs and visa-versa. This constant set of transitions across environments (e.g., mobile, LAN, home, office), devices, modalities, asynchronous and synchronous software tools invariably causes disjoints that negatively impact the manner in which people communicate and collaborate (e.g., business latency, coordination issues, lost context).

This is the backdrop for people to understand Microsoft’s acquisition of Switzerland-based Media-steams, a partner that provides VoIP technology as an add-on to Microsoft Office. Today, Media-Streams’ product, e-phone, integrates with Outlook, Exchange and Active Directory. The integration has been around for some time, at least since 2004 when it was demonstrated at a Microsoft EPS & CIO event in Lisbon. The product supports a record capability as well as other features (e.g., works with contacts stored in Outlook, note-taking) and call management functions. Incoming calls show up in the inbox and when calls are completed, they are registered in the sent mail folder and stored in Exchange (voice is treated in a similar manner to e-mail within the current architectural design and product implementation). The roadmap disclosed to-date will have this technology folded into Live Communications Server with Office System leveraging these capabilities within the upcoming O12 release.

So what are the issues or concerns? What should IT groups be asking of Microsoft?

• Outlook vs. Office Communicator (OC): Microsoft has positioned OC as its real-time communication dashboard. As Microsoft moves more into the world of unified communications, alignment and positioning between Outlook and OC need to be made much clearer to users, architects, developers, infrastructure planners and support teams.
• Exchange vs. Live Communications Server (LCS): The Exchange team has made some unclear statements about use of its repository for unified communications. There are reasonable questions and concerns about the use of the Exchange repository for this type of media storage. Topologies designed around e-mail may not be as robust when the store is extended for rich media such as voice recordings and voice mail. Also, LCS has its own repository (SQL Server) for storage of instant messaging traffic that is not “unified” with Exchange. Worse, SharePoint is being positioned by Microsoft for records management – it’s unclear whether Exchange and LCS will archive into SharePoint for compliance purposes.
• Microsoft’s repository and records management story: For e-mail, instant messaging, voice and Web conferencing artifacts, Microsoft's solution remains ambiguous at best.
• External connectivity: As of yet, there is no story as to how Media-streams connects to LCS when it is outside the firewall (as part of a federated IM design). This might entail integration with Microsoft’s earlier acquisition, Teleo, when LCS is connected to MSN via Public IM Connectivity (PIC).

So overall, this is a strategic acquisition and the important take-away is not the technology but the design-point that Microsoft is identifying as a problem-set to resolve (transitions and disjoints in the activity flow of workers). The technology puzzle pieces however remain in disarray when it comes to how Media-streams fits into Microsoft’s larger real-time collaboration picture and also how the life-cycle management of this type of rich media fits into Microsoft’s fragmented repository, storage and records management story (e.g., Exchange, LCS, SharePoint).

Comments

[Niklas]

Folks, Microsoft continues to buy VoIP companies - after Teleo this summer, MS bought Swiss VoIP company (Media-streams.com) last week. What do you think would be Skype’s value if MS (or Google) buys GIPS (current voice engine provider to Skype)?

[Mike Gotta]

I check with my colleague Irwin Lazar who responded with the following "GIPS provides the voice codec used by Skype, office communicator and numerous other softphones. Given that there are numerous suitable replacements, Microsoft buying GIPS would have no impact on Skype (I assume Skype has a license agreement with GIPS that MS would have to honor, after that Skype would just have to find another codec).

[greenw]

Mike, GIPS provided all voice engine technology to Skype, not just a codec. Skype service simply will not be able to function without GIPS (or other) voice engine. Also for the sake of consistency let me mention Office Communicator is NOT using any GIPS codec. I am an engineering guy and understand that it is very difficult to replace non-standard core technology (both Skype and GIPS are non-standard solutions), and also there are no easily suitable replacements for GIPS in Skype that I know of. So if Microsoft will buy GIPS, Skype clearly would not be safe to rely on the voice license from Microsoft, its major rival, even though Microsoft will respect the GIPS license agreement with Skype. So, my point is if Microsoft will buy GIPS, Skype will be in trouble fast to enhance and support its core voice service...