This is a transformational time for the communications industry. The transformation is being driven by two factors: 1) the convergence of all forms of communications to software-centric IP-based communications, and 2) the ever increasing need in today"s global business environment for people and teams to communicate and collaborate on-demand, anywhere, on any device. As the number of ways we can communicate with each other has increased (email, IM, VoIP-telephony, SMS, audio-video-web conferencing), so has the chaos of dealing with these silos of communications modalities. Microsoft"s vision for Unified Communications is to break down these silos, allowing people, teams and organizations to communicate simply and effectively while integrating communications with their business applications and processes. Key aspects of the vision are:
Slides:
Download the slides for Anoop Gupta's presentation (approximately 7MB).
About the speaker:
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As corporate vice president of the Unified Communications Group (UCG), Anoop Gupta leads Microsoft"s client-server-service efforts to provide business communications solutions (e-mail, IM, VoIP, unified messaging, audio/video/Web conferencing) and platform components. His team is responsible for Microsoft® Exchange Server, Microsoft Speech Server, Microsoft Office Live Meeting, FrontBridge Services, and Microsoft Office Communications products and business. |
The charter for UCG is to deliver on the "Unified Communications" vision, allowing people, teams and organizations to communicate simply and effectively while integrating seamlessly with their business applications and processes. Before leading the Unified Communications Group, Gupta was technology assistant to Bill Gates, Microsoft"s chairman. In that role, Gupta helped define the company"s strategy for real-time collaboration. He also contributed to several initiatives related to Windows Vista, the next release of the Microsoft Windows operating system, then code-named "Longhorn." Gupta became Bill Gates" technology assistant after working for four years at Microsoft Research, where he led the Collaboration and Multimedia Group. His team was responsible for development and transfer of many key technologies to product groups.
Before joining Microsoft in 1997, Gupta was a professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University for 11 years. His research at Stanford spanned computer architecture, operating systems, programming languages, simulation and performance debugging tools, and parallel applications. He also co-led, with John Hennessy, the development of hardware and software for the Stanford DASH multiprocessor, a highly concurrent shared-memory parallel computer that had a large impact on the industry. At Stanford, Gupta also led the Virtual Classroom project, which explored compression and networking issues related to transmission of audio-video over the Internet and its applications in education. In 1995, Gupta used the seeds of the technology developed in that project to form VXtreme Inc., a provider of technologies for streaming audio-visual content over the Web, which Microsoft acquired in 1997.
Gupta has published more than 100 papers in major conferences and journals, including several that have won awards. He has contributed to more than 40 patents. With David Culler and Jaswinder Pal Singh, he co-authored the book "Parallel Computer Architecture: A Hardware-Software Approach" in 1998. He received the National Science Foundation (NSF) Presidential Young Investigator Award in 1990, and he held the Robert N. Noyce Faculty Scholar Chair at Stanford for 1993 and 1994. Before joining Stanford in 1987, Gupta was on the research faculty at Carnegie Mellon University, where he received his Ph.D. in computer science in 1986. He holds a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, where he graduated, receiving the President’s Gold Medal in 1980.
Contact information:
Anoop Gupta
Microsoft Corporation
Email: anoop@microsoft.com