Microsoft Buys Another VoIP Company
Microsoft on Thursday announced that it had acquired Switzerland-based media-streams.com AG, a VoIP applications provider. The company plans to integrate the media-streams technology into its business services, such as Microsoft Office Live Communications Server.
While Live Communications Server already has PC-to-PC VoIP capability, the media-streams acquisition would add phone-to-phone service, as well as PC-to-phone and vice versa, Microsoft says.
Media-streams is Microsoft's second major telephony acquisition this year. In August, it acquired Teleo and plans to incorporate that technology into MSN, and likely into its new Windows Live products.
Microsoft says there is added benefit in integrating voice calling into its business products. For example, a user could call a contact by simply clicking on their name within a e-mail and selecting the "web call" option, and call centers could initiate support calls much in the same fashion.
"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," Anoop Gupta, corporate vice president of Microsoft's Real-Time Collaboration Group, said in a statement.
Microsoft hopes that the media-streams acquisition will help it deliver on a vision of "unified communications," in order to increase productivity among business clients.
No announcement was made as to when Microsoft plans to add the acquired capabilities into Office Live Communications Server.