IBM gives presence a boost

Analyzing IBM’s unified communications announcements

VoIP, unified messaging, products and services

Following last week’s look at VoiceCon Fall 2007 highlights, today we’d like to dig a little deeper into the three IBM announcements. During the show, IBM launched the next phase of its unified communication and collaboration (UC2) strategy by expanding its IBM Lotus Sametime software with new telephony integration software; it announced a deal with Siemens to license elements of Siemens’ OpenScape technology; and it announced plans to acquire WebDialogs.

By partnering with Siemens, IBM will improve the presence capabilities of its products, adding add click-to-call, click to conference, rules-based call control, and multi-vendor PBX support. In short, IBM will improve its SIP-based IP telephony that allows it to better compete with and/or more integrate with other suppliers’ infrastructure. The agreement is a natural evolution for both companies that share similar perspectives on both software-as-a-service (SaaS) and on open standards-based multivendor environments. IBM’s plans aren’t expected to have a negative effect on the existing partnerships IBM has with Nortel, Siemens, or others.

The second set of announced enhancements include upgrades for collaboration and integration offering features like IM, contact list management features, persistent group chat, screen sharing, and on-premise Web conferencing along with a wider integration with Microsoft Office and Outlook and support of video capabilities for Macintosh clients.

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Following last week’s look at VoiceCon Fall 2007 highlights, today we’d like to dig a little deeper into the three IBM announcements. During the show, IBM launched the next phase of its unified communication and collaboration (UC2) strategy by expanding its IBM Lotus Sametime software with new telephony integration software; it announced a deal with Siemens to license elements of Siemens’ OpenScape technology; and it announced plans to acquire WebDialogs.

By partnering with Siemens, IBM will improve the presence capabilities of its products, adding add click-to-call, click to conference, rules-based call control, and multi-vendor PBX support. In short, IBM will improve its SIP-based IP telephony that allows it to better compete with and/or more integrate with other suppliers’ infrastructure. The agreement is a natural evolution for both companies that share similar perspectives on both software-as-a-service (SaaS) and on open standards-based multivendor environments. IBM’s plans aren’t expected to have a negative effect on the existing partnerships IBM has with Nortel, Siemens, or others.

The second set of announced enhancements include upgrades for collaboration and integration offering features like IM, contact list management features, persistent group chat, screen sharing, and on-premise Web conferencing along with a wider integration with Microsoft Office and Outlook and support of video capabilities for Macintosh clients.

IBM’s announcement that it is acquiring WebDialogs for conferencing, positions IBM as a hosted conferencing service provider, placing it in competition not only with traditional service providers but also against Cisco (with WebEx) and Microsoft (with Live Meeting).

Next time, we’ll outline our thoughts on how the IBM, Siemens, Microsoft, Cisco, and Verizon announcements made last month collectively show evidence of identifiable trends in IP telephony and IP communications.

Read more about voip & convergence in Network World's VoIP & Convergence section.

Steve Taylor is president of Distributed Networking Associates and publisher/editor-in-chief of Webtorials. Larry Hettick is a principal analyst at Current Analysis.