Bridging the UC Gap: Microsoft Announces Office 365 with Lync Online

The last few months have been busy ones for the unified communications (UC) space, with a handful of companies making announcements that aim to ease UC deployment for businesses. On our side, we made the first of a series of announcements with a collaboration with Jabra on UC headsets, providing customers and channel partners with a one-stop-shop for UC desktop deployment.

However, the small and medium business market is still untapped for unified communications. Deployments are still too complex and too costly. Meeting rooms, desktop and mobile experiences are still too siloed. The answer to cracking open the SMB UC market is the cloud – which reduces capital IT expenditures and simplifies deployments at the desk and in the meeting room. Today, we’re seeing a major milestone in addressing this opportunity, as Microsoft announced the release of Office 365, an online productivity platform that leverages Microsoft Lync, Microsoft’s UC platform.

Whether you’re using one of Logitech’s business-class webcams and headsets, which are optimized for Microsoft Lync or another company’s offerings, Microsoft’s release of Office 365 with Lync Online will help spur a new wave of growth for the UC downmarket.

We’ve worked closely with Microsoft in the past to optimize our business-class Logitech and LifeSize products for Lync, and look forward to optimizing more Logitech business products for Lync in the future. Check out our new UC website: www.logitech.com/uc.