Web voice means business as Microsoft buys Tellme and Cisco acquires WebEx

Unified communications, the combination of enterprise voice and data that is currently making sweeping changes to the way businesses operate, has seen two significant moves this week.

Firstly, Microsoft announced its acquisition of Tellme Networks on Wednesday for a reported $800 million. The voice recognition specialist powers voice-enabled directory enquiries and phone services for a customer roster including Cingular, FedEx, Verizon, Merrill Lynch and Dominos (and handles upwards of 100 million voice searches per month).

Not to be outdone, Cisco announced its plans to purchase on-demand collaboration company WebEx for $3.2 billion. As Cisco ramps up its unified communications roadmap, launched last year just before Microsoft did the same, WebEx will bring a ready-made fan base and suite of hosted applications (such as calendar, email and collaborative documents) to the Cisco catalogue.

Both of these deals are indicators that there is life in the traditional enterprise technology vendors yet. Just as Google, eBay and Yahoo! stole the headlines in the last couple of years through high profile and (even higher cost) acquisitions – of YouTube, Skype and Flickr respectively, to name just three that made it to their extensive shopping lists – MS and Cisco are back in acquisition mode.

But while these doyennes of ‘web 2.0’ have been building their product stacks from a consumer angle with a view to selling to the corporations once their product lines were complete, MS and Cisco have been positioning themselves to make strategic, considered and selective deals.

After all – if you were the CTO of a multinational, multi-billion dollar enterprise and were tasked with choosing a unified communications platform, you might think twice before walking into your CEO’s office and suggesting running it on Google technology. The perception of Google being a corporate tool just isn’t there yet. For Microsoft and Cisco, that isn’t a problem.

The only problem they have got – as unified communications start to top the board-level agenda – is each other. And this is just the start.

However Microsoft and Cisco decide to fight each other in the race to corner the market for collaboration technology, it seems that, after a period of relative hibernation, the giants have at last woken up. And they’re hungry.

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Microsoft, Tellme, Cisco, WebEx