Microsoft (MSFT) finally speaks up about unified communications offering

The world's largest software company has finally said that it wants to have a universal and unified communications service package available to its customers. Apparently, it took Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT) until 2007 to figure out that having a communications system for corporate customers that combines access to voice, video, text, and other forms of communication would be helpful to its bottom line. The company already has millions of corporate server customers -- why hasn't this been provided for years now?

Anyway, Ole, Softie's 'Office Communications Server 2007', will be rolled out on October 16 at a San Francisco event that will feature an official kickoff by company co-founder Bill Gates. However, the twist here is that Microsoft wants to offer its unified communications package as a service instead of a locally-installed software package. Microsoft has realized, only in recent years, that more and more customers want products using a service model, not a traditional "installed software" model. Salesforce.com, Inc. (NYSE: CRM) realized this years ago and has done quite well with the model, as have others.

Who will Microsoft pitch this to? Most likely, smaller businesses who lack extensive IT management capabilities and who use far-flung employees around the nation of world who have a need for unified communications but don't have the in-house expertise to manage such a system on a daily basis. Want to get those voicemails delivered to your web-based Outlook inbox? Although that capability exists already, what if you don't have Exchange Server installed? That is the market Microsoft wants to shore up here.