At the launch event in New York, CIO.com's Shane O'Neill sat down with Gartner Research Vice President Stephen Blood to map out the advantages and challenges of moving your company to Lync.

What Lync offers businesses is the ability to access and switch between instant messaging, video and voice telephony features in a single interface. Other companies provide these tools, but none have seamlessly integrated them as well as Microsoft, says Blood.

The biggest Lync competitor is Cisco, but its UC suite tends to be more expensive. IBM's UC suite, Sametime, doesn't have the voice component. It does IM and Web conferencing, but it relies on PBX vendors for the voice telephony part.