In just 12 months, Microsoft’s unified communications (UC) platform is in use by more than half of Fortune 500 companies. According to Gurdeep Singh Pall, the company’s corporate vice president of the Unified Communications Group, the seamless integration between Exchange Server 2007 and Office Communications Server 2007 is the important point for customers to get into this service.

Unified communications (UC) is “an industry term used to describe all forms of call and multimedia/cross-media message-management functions controlled by an individual user for both business and social purposes”

“Selling unified communications like a puzzle that customers need to assemble and configure themselves runs counter to the whole concept of unified communications,” he said. “Our competitors are offering, in effect, an ‘un-unified’ communications system.”

Currently, Cisco and Microsoft are on a collision course in unified communications,” Joe Wilcox wrote. For example, Cisco is buying Jabber. Wilcox revealed, Jabber will give Cisco some real scale for enterprise instant message, presence and collaboration.

On the cell-phone side, according to Mary Jo Foley, Microsoft is working on a set of Communications Server services for Windows Mobile phones. “These services are codenamed Rouge,” she said.