Cost of OCS too high for some customers

The results of an Osterman Research, shows that customers perceive OCS as too expensive to deploy and too complicated to manage, and many lack the in-house expertise to handle it. Coming out a recession, I would have expected that OCS with the numerous feature and cost savings benefits that it would be a fundamental building block for organizations to embark on greater cost savings. Many customers lack the compelling business case and I personally think this is because customers don’t take the time to analyze and investigate their our usage scenarios to understand the benefits.

 

According to the survey of 121 customers from North America, tighter budgets were the major inhibitor and coupled with the high upfront and ongoing costs being additional factors. Many customers feel that OCS needs far too many servers for a supported deployment. Adding to the costs were the server costs and operating system licenses for the hardware. Compared to Microsoft Lync, the successor of OCS, fewer servers are needed for a supported deployment.  Many customers are waiting for Microsoft Lync to go RTM. With Microsoft Lync, Microsoft is supporting all the roles virtually and this means that customers can have the setup on a single server.