UPDATED: Microsoft has purchased privately held
media-streams.com to add Voice over IP
applications and servers.
It’s Microsoft’s second recent
acquisition in the space and comes as a slew of Internet, communications
and software industry players buy or build VoIP offerings.
Zurich, Switzerland-based media-streams.com said its e-phone product turns
e-mail into a phone by integrating corporate voice communication into
Microsoft Outlook.
The five-year-old firm will be a Microsoft subsidiary, reporting to the
Real-Time Collaboration Group under corporate vice president Anoop Gupta.
All 23 media-streams.com employees will be offered jobs with Microsoft.
Financial terms were not disclosed.
In a statement, Gupta said that adding voice to Office will “enable exciting
new collaboration scenarios that will improve individual and team
collaboration.”
The pickup dovetails with Microsoft’s overarching goal of melding e-mail,
instant messaging, short message service, voice and conferencing to save
users time. (Another move to boost productivity and availability was this
week’s announcement
of Office Live.)
In a letter to employees, customers and partners posted on its Web site,
media-streams.com executives said Microsoft will continue to deliver its
products until they are integrated. Microsoft did not release a timeline
however.
“Microsoft will work to incorporate the appropriate aspects of
media-streams.com’s technology into its Office Real-Time Collaboration
platform — Live Communications Server — over time to fulfill customer and
partner needs,” a Microsoft spokeswoman told internetnews.com.
Microsoft was aware of media-streams.com before closing the deal. The small
company is scheduled to be part of the Redmond, Wash., software giant’s IT
Forum 05 event this month in Barcelona.
In August, Microsoft bought Teleo, a developer of VoIP, PSTN
termination and click-to-call functionality. That technology can be used to
bring VoIP to the consumer.
Others are opening their corporate coffers as well. The deal is just the
latest in a flurry of VoIP technology acquisitions this year, highlighted
by eBay’s $2.6 billion
run at Skype.
In other Microsoft acquisition news, the company purchased the FolderShare
service from Austin, Texas-based ByteTaxi for an undisclosed sum.
FolderShare is a file synchronization and remote access technology to help
users access information across multiple devices. The move supports
Microsoft’s Windows Live initiative.
