Conflicting strategies aired at unified comms show

Putting Microsoft and the largest telephony vendors next to each other and telling them to discuss how best to implement UC could have created tension, given their vastly different strategies.

But all the vendors acted amiably, and each in turn claimed they were keen to work with the others to produce a range of interoperable products.

Unfortunately, such interoperability continues to remain a pipedream in the majority of cases. While the smaller vendors on this table, such as Tandberg and ShoreTel, have a lot to gain from interoperability, the industry behemoths Cisco and Microsoft could have a lot to lose.

For the time being, they seem happy to talk up interoperability while doing little in reality to help businesses deploy products from more than one vendor.