As part of their latest online initiative for extending Microsoft services to the masses through Windows Live and Office Live, the software giant announced their acquisition of Swiss software company media-streams.com to offer voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) for office communications.
Microsoft acquired Teleo in August to add VoIP services to MSN Messenger. The purchase of media-streams.com and use of their brand of VoIP is specifically designed for businesses to enhance integration of corporate messaging, adding to email, instant messaging, short messaging service, audio, video, and Web conferencing.
The technology provided by media-streams.com, says Microsoft, will improve the VoIp experience based on the Microsoft Office Real-time collaboration platform on the Office Live Communications Server.
“We are in lock-step with Microsoft’s vision of bringing voice and data
collaboration together, and we have built our business around delivering enhanced real-time communications for enterprise and small to midsize customers,” said Erich Gebhardt, CEO of media-streams.com.
Microsoft says VoIP offers information workers more communications flexibility in collaborative scenarios by delivering persuasive capabilities that enable people to work together more effectively withing the context of their most used software services.
“Integrating voice communications with the rich collaboration capabilities of the Microsoft Office System will enable exciting new collaboration scenarios that will improve individual and team collaboration,” said Anoop Gupta, corporate vice president of the Real-Time Collaboration Group at Microsoft.
“media-streams.com’s VoIP technology will become available as part of the Real-Time Collaboration platform from Microsoft, significantly enhancing the value delivered to customers and opportunities for partners. The acquisition accelerates our ability to deliver on our vision of unified communications.”
Microsoft is responding to a changing software and Internet business environment spurred on by highly successful ventures produced by rivals like Google, Yahoo!, AOL, and eBay, who acquired Skype telephony company last month for around $4 billion.
