IBM and Cisco Wednesday announced a unified communications partnership and promised to deliver integration among their products including real-time clients and back-end servers, as well as an open-client framework for developers.

The pair said it would combine efforts from the IBM/Lotus UC2 Client Platform and communication and collaboration products from both companies in an announcement made at the VoiceCon show in Orlando. Those products include Lotus Sametime, Lotus Expeditor, Cisco Unified IP Phones and Cisco Unified MeetingPlace.

IBM, Cisco, Nortel, Microsoft and a host of other vendors are racing to provide the front-end and back-end tools needed to support real-time communication via voice, video and text.

Last year at VoiceCon, IBM and Cisco announced that IBM’s Global Technology Services division would provide custom integration with Cisco communications wares and Lotus Sametime. That same year, Cisco announced similar integration of its real-time communications platform and Microsoft’s software.

This year’s announcement between Cisco and IBM will bring last year’s integration to users in an “off-the-shelf” fashion. Cisco will also resell Lotus Sametime and IBM/Lotus Software Group will resell Cisco products.

“The click-to-call and the voice mail plug-ins will be free. Those are built by Cisco” says Akiba Saeedi,program director for unified communications and collaboration at IBM.

The pair plan a trio of joint offerings including click-to-call and voice mail integration that lets users send instant messages to and from Cisco Unified IP Phones, view and play Cisco Unity voice messages, and click-to-call another user directly from their Lotus Sametime 7.5.1 client.

IBM introduced the click-to-call feature at its recent Lotusphere conference but did not reveal that Cisco would be supporting that feature via plug-ins. The integration with Cisco is slated to ship in the first half of this year.