Watch out, Cisco. Move over, Microsoft. Unified communications and the Asterisk open source platform are on a collision course. In fact, a startup called Worxbox hopes to accelerate that convergence. Here’s why anyone interested in the unified communications market should care.

A group of former execs from a Microsoft messaging hosting partner are going to launch a Linux-based unified communications platform that will compete directly against Microsoft.

Unison is offering a unified communications suite of e-mail, messaging and VoIP as an alternative to Exchange and Outlook.

eBox Platform is a unified network server that offers easy and efficient computer network administration for small and medium-size businesses. It can act as a gateway, an infrastructure manager, a unified threat manager, an office server, a unified communication server or a combination of them.

With Microsoft poised to unleash its next collaboration and unified communication (UC) suite next week, rival IBM is launching a preemptive strike by promising a tight level of integration between its own UC platform and its new, free Lotus Symphony productivity suite.

Announced at CEBIT, the Unison suite supposedly hits all of the main communications needs: IP telephony, email, IM, address book and 'presence' capabilities, all in a single Linux server. Beats out MS Office Communications Server, apparently. Free public beta.

Linux Unified Kernel which I was telling you about a few days ago was recently recently reached version 0.2.4.

Zentyal, a Linux distribution formerly known as eBox Platform, is a server distribution which can be used as a network gateway, unified threat manager, office server, infrastructure manager, and a unified communications server. By default, it is installed on an LVM-based disk partitioning scheme, but in a manner that is not optimal.

Linux Unified Kernel claims to allow you to run Windows application native under Linux (I haven't tested it yet though). The installation is quite simple from what I saw, simply download the version called "Linux Unified Kernel 0.2.3 with wine and linux kernel" and then all you have to do is run this (make it executable and double click it):