Lync versus Jabber: How Do You Decide?Lync versus Jabber: How Do You Decide?

This Enterprise Connect session will not tell you the answer to which one to choose, but will provide you a tool to help your organization decide.

For many organizations, the decision about whether to deploy the Lync client that comes with their enterprise Microsoft licenses or the free Jabber collaboration client that comes as an extension of their Cisco VoIP and video systems is a real challenge. With a strong political camp often backing each option, plus the complexity of deciding, many organizations are at a standstill. And even when a decision is recommended, it is often challenged as subjective and biased.

To help a client analyze this challenge, PKE Consulting has developed a quantitative model to enable teams to work through a comparison. This model uses 16 factors of organizational interoperability and TCO as the value inputs, and then enables each vendor offer to be evaluated for each factor.

Figure 1 shows the process that is built into the analysis model. For each factor, a weighting is established for both Knowledge and Information Workers. This is tailored to the needs of the organization.

Figure 2 shows the top level factors that are included in the analysis model. After inputting the weighting of the factors, then the vendors are rated in each area as well.

The model then takes the data and generates quantitative comparisons with graphical outputs as shown in Figure 3.

If this type of a analysis sounds interesting, I will be presenting this model at Enterprise Connect on Monday at 2 PM in Sun A. The session will include a complete description of the model and how it works and will include a reactor panel with Jeremy Laurenson, Distinguished Systems Engineer at Cisco and Taimoor Husain, Global Business Lead at Microsoft.

The session will not tell you the answer to which one to choose, but will provide you a tool to help your organization decide. All attendees will have the opportunity to receive a working Excel version of the tool, including an automatically generated PowerPoint chart set that can be customized to their company to present the results.