Microsoft has announced that Office Communications Server (OCS) 2007 and Office Communicator 2007 have been released to manufacturing, with a launch scheduled for later this autumn.

Microsoft’s Unified Communications (UC) group product manager, Mark Deakin, said the software giant was aiming to create a system to support conferencing, instant messaging and VoIP to be delivered as a single product experience. “The open standards-based architecture of Office Communications Server delivers this through existing telephony infrastructure,” he added.

The new UC systems from Microsoft could already be giving vendors of hardware-based IP telephony systems pause for thought.

Microsoft’s UC group vice-president Gurdeep Singh Pall said, “We believe all forms of enterprise communications, including VoIP, are moving from hardware-based systems to software. Over the last year, we’ve seen customers and partners increasingly validate our viewpoint and our strategy in this space.”

The market for UC systems is rapidly growing, according to recent figures from Infonetics Research. The analyst said that between 2005 and 2006, sales of UC applications increased 21 percent to $363m. “[The market is] expected to grow in the high double digits each year from now at least through 2010,” the firm added.

Infonetics’ Matthias Machowinski said that unified communications was the buzz word of the day for the IT industry, but added that there were a lot of different ideas about what it actually constituted. “What everyone seems to agree on, though, is that there are two key components that form the cornerstone of UC: unified messaging, which stores all message types; and communicator, a presence-enabled directory that shows contact availability by communication mode,” he added.

Machowinski said that a true UC user will have both elements, but that currently the unified messaging market is by far the largest.