Several interesting Lotus unified communications announcements

August 22 2007

Just a few minutes ago, IBM announced the acquisition of WebDialogs, the introduction of a family of UC2 (unified communications) products, and an OEM agreement with Siemens around the OpenScape technology.  As the press release (link coming) says,

With the acquisition of WebDialogs, IBM is adding a software as a service delivery model to the Lotus Sametime family of products, providing customers with choice and flexibility in how they buy and operate their web conferencing services.  IBM will also integrate the service with its industry-leading1 collaboration portfolio, including IBM Lotus Notes and IBM Lotus Sametime software.
and from Siemens' press release:
Under the agreement, IBM will license elements of OpenScape software and integrate them within IBM Lotus Sametime "Unified Telephony" software, the recently announced addition to IBM's industry leading unified communications and collaboration strategy. By incorporating OpenScape technology, Lotus software users will benefit from easy to use communications tools within the applications they already use regardless of their back-end telephony systems.

Another important enterprise IT benefit is that incorporating OpenScape technology into the Lotus Sametime "Unified Telephony" offering will enable Lotus customers to decouple their unified communications investments from their PBX infrastructure. This makes a single, consistent communications image across a heterogeneous telephony environment possible.
More details coming.  Also see Adam Gartenberg's take on all of this.

Ed Brill | Highland Park, IL USA Category:  Sametime 7.5  Add/View Comments [5]

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  1. 1  Rob Murphy  | 8/22/2007 1:29:33 PM

    Here is the news release with FAQ.

    { Link }

  1. 2  Carl Tyler http://www.iminstant.com | 8/22/2007 2:14:15 PM

    WOW. OpenScape had been tied really closely to Microsoft OCS so this is amazing, I guess Siemens woke up and smelt the roses.

  1. 3  Bill Brown  | 8/23/2007 12:41:46 PM

    Riddle me this Batman. We're going to a VOIP system in a few months. It comes with a replacement mail template. We're looking at integrating a document retention system we already have with Notes/Domino. It comes with its own replacement mail template.

    Are we forced to decide between VOIP integration or retention integration and the other application is SOL?

    The VOIP plans have been known for a while. The document retention issue just got thrown at me this AM. I haven't had a chance to ask the vendors yet, but I thought I'd throw it out here.

  1. 4  Rob Ingram http://www.dominoblog.com | 8/24/2007 5:45:11 PM

    Kind of depends what the template change is in both cases. May be one to post in one of the Notes forums as well. Start by asking each vendor for more info on the template change designh details.