At IBM's annual Lotusphere conference held last week in Orlando, IBM and its partners made a series of announcements about its advances with Lotus Sametime, the company's unified communications platform. Building on some big customer wins over the year with companies including Bank of NY, Celina Insurance, Colgate Palmolive, HSBC and Prudential U.K., IBM unveiled a new set of channel partnership agreements, OEM arrangements, and additions to the Lotus Sametime Business Partner program for cross-vendor interoperability.

Expanding its channel partner program, IBM disclosed that:
* Cisco and IBM will expand the companies’ joint go-to- market activities, which will include Cisco's plans to sell Lotus Sametime directly and through its partner channel.
* Nortel will sell and integrate Lotus Sametime as part of its enterprise unified communications solutions.
* Carestream Health, a leading provider of imaging technology to radiology departments worldwide, will integrate and sell Lotus Sametime software within its radiology solutions.

New additions to the Lotus Sametime Business Partner community:
* Ericsson will work with IBM on the user’s unified communications and collaboration experience, including mobility and telephony. The first step is to integrate Ericsson's voice platform, MX-ONE.
* NEC will integrate its PBX telephony system with Lotus Sametime. NEC's Univerge gateway module for IBM Lotus Sametime integrates presence and click-to-call from instant messages, Web conferencing, or e-mail messages.
* Nortel and IBM are working together on a unified communications solution for small-and-midsize businesses and branch offices to deploy IP telephony and advanced multimedia and collaboration services.

IBM also announced planned enhancements to Lotus Sametime Advanced that will help users create new communities and contacts. Plans include features such as persistent chat, instant sharing capabilities and enhancements to presence and contact capabilities.

Planned for availability later this year, Lotus Sametime Unified Telephony enhancements will help users manage telephone calls from within Lotus Sametime.

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