VoiceCon San Francisco wrapped up last week with more news on the unified communications front. Perhaps the most noteworthy item came from IBM and Microsoft following up on a commitment, made in Orlando in March 2008, to improve interoperability. The companies announced they have now demonstrated "interdomain federation" between Microsoft OCS and IBM Sametime and that the feature will be available in products within the next few months. 

The interdomain interoperability allows sending and receiving certain presence information between OCS and Sametime, but more work has yet to be finished on "interdomain federation," which allows for more complete application-level integration. The companies promised to keep working together to improve interoperability.

In another collaborative initiative, Genesys and IBM have now incorporated unified communications interoperability in the contact center between IBM’s Sametime and Genesys’ Customer Interaction Management Suite (CIM). Genesys has developed a new application called Enterprise Connect to create links between SameTime and CIM. Enterprise Connect will be used by contact center agents to request assistance from experts using Sametime. General release is scheduled in Q1 2009.

NEC Unified Solutions and Tellme, a Microsoft subsidiary, announced an agreement to offer on-demand, customizable enterprise-class voice services. Building on 30-year relationship between the two companies, the agreement is intended to provide “end-to-end services from network planning and design through testing, tuning and ongoing customer support,” according to the announcement.

Furthering their interoperability, Zeacom (which provides unified communications and contact center solutions for the SMB market) announced that its Zeacom Communications Center (ZCC) 5.1 software is now compliant with key IP telephony solutions from Avaya. 

In a follow-up discussion we had with Zeacom’s CEO Miles Valentine, he observed that one critical success factor for unified communications in the SMB market relies on the fact that resellers who target the SMB market already understand the importance of presence and presence profiles to contact center business processes, so making the transition from traditional computer-telephone integration (CTI) to unified communications is straightforward. 

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