This means companies using Microsoft’s phone solution won’t be stuck with headsets. The announcement came just a couple of months after the software vendor made a big deal about a study — which it had commissioned — showing that its soft phones provided better call quality than some Cisco desk phones. Taken at face value, that might give you the impression that Microsoft saw the future mainly in terms of headsets and soft clients running on PCs. Yesterday’s announcement proved otherwise.

Microsoft has been touting OCS 2007 as a large enterprise solution, complete with predictions that 100 million Office users will be using click to call within three years. But at least one observer thinks it’s looking at another target in the meantime.

Frost & Sullivan Analyst Krithi Rao notes that a number of the phone manufacturers in the announcement have been targeting small and medium-sized businesses in the U.S.

“I see [Microsoft] with their announcement telling small business customers that if you don’t need a full sized PBX with all possible call control capabilities, our solution, which has some level of telephony capabilities, can be deployed with these end points which are already certified with our solution,” said Rao. “And you have a communications system up and running.”

At the same time, any move towards the low end of the market would — in addition to distracting unwary competitors — give Microsoft time to get its act together for an assault on the large enterprise.

“I think right now OCS is a step in the right direction, but it still doesn’t include all the necessary call control features an Avaya or Cisco or Nortel have in their PBXs,” said Dell’Oro Group Analyst Alan Weckel. “As a standalone product it doesn’t work, so in this round they have to cooperate with all the PBX vendors in order for this product to be successful.”

But it won’t need to cooperate, or to deflect attention from its real plans, forever.

“If I ask you in the future what’s in the next version of Office Communications Server, say in 2009 or 2010, you might say they’ve added enough functionality that you no longer need another PBX for call control,” said Weckel. “The basic call control resides in the Office Communications Server, and the PBX is a peripheral device to do international call control and a couple of complex things like that.”

By then, you’ll have long forgotten how humorous it was to think of putting such a critical activity as talking on the phone in the hands of a maker of notoriously unreliable operating systems.

What is different now? VoIP. Vonage (News - Alert) has done the marketing to educate small businesses about the power of IP communications and the small business owners are getting it. Do they all understand the massive potential afforded by the latest in Internet protocol communications? Of course not, but they know there are more choices, ranging from open source to hosted systems to IP PBXs. It is astounding in fact how many choices there are for a small business these days.

According to AMI-Partners, the growth in this space is expected to hover at 11% between 2005 and 2007. The research firm estimates that, at the end of this year, the total size of the SMB communications space shall be $6.7 billion. The IPPBX ( News - Alert) business is slated to grow at a — hold on to your hat and have a seat — 33% for the next five years.