Miercom has recently released a comprehensive report on the voice and security capabilities of Lync 2010. I’ve not dealt or heard of Miercom before but they certainly don’t look anything other than independent. They have a deep breadth of manufacturers that they have reported on and include Avaya and Cisco testimonials on their website.
The Microsoft engineering team will be most pleased but the likes of Avaya and Cisco will have to think harder on how they tackle the Microsoft threat. Avaya’s and Cisco main marketing thrust against Lync is that you can’t trust your voice estate to Microsoft. This report provides Microsoft with a comprehensive riposte.
The full report on Lync is available here but there are some real highlights for me:
Significant developments in reliability, security, and a business enabling features make Microsoft Lync a viable option for businesses looking to revolutionize their current communications platform.
HD Video performance with limited bandwidth:
Microsoft Lync successfully passed voice and video Quality of Experience (QoE) tests under heavily loaded and degraded network conditions. Even with significant jitter and a packet loss percentage in excess of 5% the voice and video quality of the Lync client with High Definition Video was superb. High Definition Video Conferencing was conducted over T1 bandwidth with an average bandwidth of only 142 Kbps needed to maintain the connection. Peak traffic utilization did hit 1.5 Mbps at times when there was full motion in the video sessions.
Call Admission Control option available:
In tests we restricted new video and voice call requests from being initiated based on available bandwidth. Microsoft Lync 2010 has very extensive call admission control capabilities to ensure QoE is maintained for customer networks. If resources are insufficient for a quality experience the session is refused and alert is generated.
Resiliency and failover now integral:
We established intra-branch calls between multiple Lync clients, and then pulled the WAN cable at the SBA. We observed that intra-branch calls remained up, and the Lync clients did not log off or on during failover. We were able to place new calls successfully during failover.
And perhaps the most satisfying for the Microsoft engineering team:
Microsoft Lync Server 2010 was able to sustain heavy call volume without dropping any calls or reporting any errors in a 4 million call completion test. The delivery rate with sustained operation without error is the highest capacity test applied to any Unified Communications / IP PBX product we have tested to date.
Bottom line from the report:
Microsoft Lync 2010 is a resilient, scalable, feature rich Unified Communications System. Microsoft Lync 2010 should be in the short list of top three to consider for enterprises communications infrastructure upgrades.
For comparison I went back and read the Miercom report from three years ago on Microsoft’s OCS R2 release and Miercom came to the conclusion that while OCS R2 was a large step forward it was not a PBX replacement due to a complex and costly architecture which suffered from unanswered reliability and security questions. This seemed to be reflected in customer’s views of OCS R2. Good but not ready to take on the full voice capability.
The Microsoft engineering seem to have comprehensively answered the questions from OCS R2. The focus now has to shift to the Microsoft partner channel and direct account teams to see if they can exploit the opportunity and start to generate licence sales and win business off the likes of Cisco and Avaya.
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