Who Leads in UC Mindshare?Who Leads in UC Mindshare?

Microsoft comes out a winner; Lotus Samtime was dead-flat, and Cisco does appear to have gotten some traction.

Last year I used this survey question of Brent Kelly's to ruminate on Cisco's future directions for the desktop. Now Brent has an update on that survey and, specifically, the question of who's leading in UC client mindshare.Here's last year's chart:

And here's the current survey, which Brent will present as part of his VoiceCon tutorial on Microsoft and IBM:

(note: the date on this slide should be 2008, not 2007--ed.)

As you can see, Microsoft comes out a winner here; the number of survey respondents who say they are "not considering" OCS has fallen from 28% to just 13%, while those who are using OCS have risen from 11% to 32%, and those considering OCS stayed steady at 32%.

In contrast, Brent's numbers for Lotus Samtime are dead-flat: Using, Considering and Not Considering all stayed exactly the same from last year to this; Don't Know fell from 22% to 16%.

Cisco does appear to have gotten some traction, if not some adoption, for its UPC client; while those using UPC now stayed nearly steady--up from 9% to 11%--those Considering rose from 26% to 40%, and those Not Considering fell from 40% to 27%, and Don't Know fell from 24% 16%.

Most of the rest of the pack picked up small growth for their UC clients, but not enough to suggest they're poised to make a run at the Big Three.

Since I blogged about Brent's earlier study, Cisco has made a number of acquisitions in the email/desktop space; whether this has had any effect on raising users' awareness of Cisco in this role, who knows? But certainly, as we've seen over the last year, there are precious few markets that Cisco isn't looking to break into, so the communications desktop makes more sense than ever.

And if they're going to do it, they'll need to hurry. It's safe to say that, although one-third of Brent's survey base have deployed OCS to the desktop, these are not large-scale deployments. But the window will keep closing.Microsoft comes out a winner; Lotus Samtime was dead-flat, and Cisco does appear to have gotten some traction.