Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 Pricing

Michael Dunn, one of  the gotspeech.net guys, wrote the first article that I saw in public about the pricing for the new Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007.  Michael does an example configuration of a typical speech recognition system that will handle 96 ports.  For the speech recognition engine, Text-to-speech, development and deployment environment the software license price comes to $700.  Not $700 per port, but $700 for software for the entire server!

That’s a little more than $7 per port.  OK, that doesn’t include hardware so factor in the price of a good rack mounted server, and a VoIP gateway if you can’t talk SIP with your PBX.

Michael speculates that you could do a touch-tone application and get as many as 200 ports on a single server.  Still $700.  He says that’s roughly $3.50 per port for the software.  “Insanely Cheap” he says.  I’d agree with that!  Even allowing for redundancy and extra capacity, this still slashes the price in the market for the typical speech recognition telephone self service application.

You can read more about the product at http://www.microsoft.com/uc

Microsoft also published two new case studies that I’m particularly happy to see, given that Gold Systems did the software development on both of them.

• Microsoft Xbox http://www.microsoft.com/technet/itshowcase/content/Speechxbox.mspx

• Customer case study  (Microsoft has permission to say the customer name, but I'll just say "A well-know overnight package delivery and office services company.  Click the link if you can't guess who THAT is."  http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/casestudy.aspx?casestudyid=4000000579

Avaya, another one of my business partners, began the move from "Big Iron" to software solutions many years ago, designing less proprietary hardware and relying more on industry standard hardware.  It's been a smart move for them.  They also saw that computers and telephones would come together and they've moved away from closed systems to open systems, being one of the earliest proponents of Unified Communications.  As I’ve said before, lower prices and more companies deploying applications is good for the industry and the consumer.