Microsoft's Great Communicator

Gurdeep Singh Pall is lead-ing Microsoft's charge into unified communications, a change he describes as being "as fundamental as the shift from the telegraph to the telephone." Pall and his team have melded presence, IM, e-mail, voice, and collaboration capabilities into Office Communication Server 2007, Microsoft's UC platform, and are now working on what's next.

Competitors coming from the conventional voice market aim to extend the PBX-based model of communication into data networks, Pall says, while Microsoft is developing new methods to communicate and collaborate via software.

Eighty percent of people tell Microsoft that the desktop is their primary communications tool at work, but the phone is still a separate, critical island. "We knew part of what we needed to do was make the phone work like the other tools people use to communicate and collaborate," Pall says. So far, Microsoft offers presence, calendars, and application and document sharing to help collaboration.

Next for unified communications: Pall envisions deeper integration with the desktop. A lot of institutional learning happens in meetings--in conversation, video, or document sharing, he says--but much of that content is lost without a way to store, search, and retrieve what was said and presented. Pall sees all facets of collaboration eventually being searchable, savable, and shareable content.

Pall is focused on the next version of Office Communication Server, but he's mum on the details. If he really can turn his vision into products, this change in how we communicate will indeed live up to Pall's telegraph-to-telephone comparison.

Q&A With Gurdeep Singh Pall

InformationWeek: Where did you get the ideas for putting other the collaboration features in Office Communication Server?

Pall: Customers told us that knowledge work is increasingly collaborative, and communication tools weren't addressing the way people work today. We noticed the challenges people and teams faced trying to collaborate with peers, customers, and partners. We saw an early need to use software to solve these problems while delivering new levels of openness and integration with partners.

InformationWeek: How do you see Microsoft's unified communications product path compared to others like Avaya, Cisco, and Siemens?

Pall: We have a software-driven approach. Others will tell you it's all about the network. That's like saying Facebook is popular because they have really great network connections to their servers and not because people love the application experience. We believe that the value of unified communications is where people do their work every day-through software applications.

InformationWeek: What's the one thing you can't do with OCS 2007 today, or any UC system, that you would like to do?

Pall: Business requirements will vary among companies. For example, the collaboration needs of customers in hospitality, healthcare, or financial services can be radically different. No one UC system can address all these unique needs, but with a software platform, Microsoft partners can build tailored applications to address these specific requirements.

InformationWeek: What are the two or three critical features or functions you and your team will be focusing on?

Pall: You have to take a step back and look at the path that software provides and how it's opening up things that we never thought possible. We believe unified communications should be seamlessly integrated into every application, just as we've done with the Microsoft Office system, and you'll see us make that happen by delivering tools to software developers. We will maintain our focus on the broader partner ecosystem-device manufacturers, systems integrators, and software developers-and delivering a software platform that will ignite continued growth and innovation.

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