IBM announced Tuesday at Lotusphere that it has made significant advances into the rapidly growing unified communications market, and the company unveiled a range of large client adoptions and major OEM embedded software and reseller agreements for Lotus Sametime.
Large-scale client in-house adoption of IBM's unified communications and collaboration (UC2) platform continues to grow, IBM reported. Bank of NY, Celina Insurance, and Prudential UK, have selected Sametime to deliver integrated communications capabilities such as telephony and audio and video conferencing with critical collaboration features such as instant messaging, group chat, and Web conferencing to their employees. In 2007, IBM estimates that nearly one-third of new Lotus Sametime customers were Microsoft Exchange shops.
IBM said it is teaming with a new set of channel partners that will make it easier for businesses around the world to purchase and use IBM's UC2 platform-Lotus Sametime. IBM noted that Sametime has been in existence now for a decade, and IBM employees celebrated its 10th anniversary at the show.
The latest agreements with leaders in unified communications and in health care include:
• Cisco-Cisco will sell Lotus Sametime as part of its Unified Communications solutions through its more than 1,200 Cisco Master and Advanced Specialized partners worldwide. This will help enable Cisco Unified Communications customers to integrate Lotus Sametime with Cisco Unified Communications Manager, Cisco Unity, Cisco Unified IP phones, and Cisco Unified MeetingPlace.
• Nortel-Nortel will offer a new unified communications solution that includes Lotus Sametime and technology for the Nortel Multimedia Communications Server and Nortel SOA Application Core Base. The Nortel Multimedia Client for IBM Lotus Sametime solution enables business users to gain easier access to colleagues and multimedia capabilities through the integration of the Nortel MCS 5100 into IBM Lotus Sametime. Users can check the status of colleagues, use instant messaging, call, or initiate an audio or video conference session-all with a simple click of the mouse. Businesses will be able to purchase this solution from Nortel and its partners around the world.
• Carestream Health-Carestream Health, the leading provider of imaging technology to radiology departments worldwide, will integrate and sell Lotus Sametime software within its radiology solutions facilitating rapid communication with instant messaging and voice over Internet protocol (VOIP) interactions between radiologists and other medical professionals.
These agreements represent the OEM part of IBM's aggressive UC2 strategy and are designed to extend the reach of IBM software to new and expanding markets.
Leading telephony vendors from around the world are investing in Lotus Sametime through product and service integration. New additions to the Lotus Sametime Business Partner community include:
• Ericsson-Ericsson will work with IBM to integrate Ericsson's mobile unified communication solutions with IBM's unified collaborations suite. The integration of Ericsson's voice platform MX-ONE with IBM Lotus Sametime will enable users to click on a name in Lotus Sametime to start a call and then decide how they would like to manage the call either via VOIP, conference call, mobile or office phone. Additionally, Ericsson will provide phone presence information, allowing users to see if a contact is present within their Lotus Sametime client.
• NEC-NEC, a global market leader in enterprise telephony equipment, will integrate their PBX telephony system with Lotus Sametime. NEC's UNIVERGE gateway module for IBM Lotus Sametime will allow users to see a contact's telephone presence and click to being a call from within a Lotus Sametime instant message, Web conference, or IBM Lotus Notes email message.
• Nortel-Nortel, a provider of next generation communications capabilities, and IBM announced the availability of a Unified Communications solution that will provide a simple and cost-effective way for small-and-medium sized businesses and branch offices to deploy IP telephony and advanced multimedia and collaboration services. The Nortel-IBM System i Unified Communications solution will make the move to IP telephony and unified communications as easy as a software upgrade. This simple, cost-effective, new solution will combine leading software including Lotus Sametime and hardware from IBM with advanced IP telephony and multimedia capabilities from Nortel, to allow for the consolidation of voice over Internet protocol (VOIP), multimedia collaboration and other core business applications onto a single, robust, and highly-scalable System i platform.
"When users are exposed to the integration of collaboration, data, and voice, people are more productive and business moves faster-that's exactly what we are seeing with Lotus Sametime," said Bruce Morse, vice president, unified communications and collaboration, IBM Lotus software. "Today's announcement reflects a dramatic increase in our ability to deliver unified communications to millions of users worldwide."
At Lotusphere, IBM also demonstrated the newest members of the Lotus Sametime family of products-Lotus Sametime Advanced and Lotus Sametime Unified Telephony. Planned for availability in the first half of 2008, Lotus Sametime Advanced software features the industry's first suite of real-time community tools that will make it easier to find information and share expertise in real time with groups of people. Instead of spending time trying to figure out who can help solve a problem, users can reach out to a community of people instantly. By unlocking the constraints of a user's contact list, Lotus Sametime Advanced will help people create new communities and contacts.
Plans for Lotus Sametime Advanced also feature sophisticated collaboration features such as persistent chat, enabling users to keep a continuous chat discussion running on a specific topic with a related community of people. The instant sharing capabilities of Lotus Sametime Advanced let users start a screen or application sharing session and allow other participants to "drive" and make changes to documents. Additionally, users will be able to save time and effort by having the location of colleagues pre-populated highlighting where users are located and the last known location of off-line contacts.
Planned for availability later this year, Lotus Sametime Unified Telephony helps users manage telephone calls from within Lotus Sametime. With Lotus Sametime Unified Telephony users can route calls to various devices and set rules on how to handle calls based on their status. For example, a user could select to have all calls routed to a mobile device when their calendar shows they are in a meeting.
Building a unified communications environment can be a complex task. Utilizing IBM Global Technology Services expertise in deploying IP telephony and conferencing solutions, Lotus Sametime Unified Telephony can allow businesses to integrate their existing telephony and audio-conferencing systems into Sametime while maintaining a consistent end-user experience, IBM said. In addition, Lotus Sametime Unified Telephony works with a wide range of PBX systems, giving organizations the flexibility to select telephony systems based on need rather than vendor.
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