What’s Next for UC and Virtualization Software in Private Clouds

B. Riggs

Summary Bullets:

• How UC software deployed in private clouds will change
• What will change: Support for multiple hypervisors, a variety of server hardware, and advanced management features

Continuing on the topic of unified communications and virtualization from my previous IT Connections blog, UC solutions’ support for server virtualization is facilitating their deployment in private cloud environments. This has taken the form of Cisco, Siemens Enterprise, Mitel, and others adding support for VMware vSphere on their various UC and contact center platforms, while Avaya supports Citrix XenServer. This luxury of vendors being able to pick and choose which server virtualization platform they support is likely to be short-lived. Their widespread support for VMware vSphere is understandable. VMware commands a large share of the market, so choosing to support VMware means that a large number of enterprises will be able to deploy UC software in data centers. However, VMware is not the only game in town and not all enterprises have standardized on it. As a result, developers of UC solutions will soon need to support other hypervisors as well. Microsoft is ahead in this particular game. When Lync was launched early this year, it included support not only for Microsoft’s Hyper-V hypervisor, but also for VMware and Citrix hypervisors.