A Cooperative Project of VoiceCon and UC Strategies

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It’s been Lotusphere week for the UC Strategies team, and what follows is a quick recap of some of the highlights.

Mike Rhodin, General Manager of IBM Lotus Software, set the stage in the opening general session by emphasizing the importance of collaboration, noting that 750 out of 765 CEOs interviewed identified collaboration as one of their main priorities. Mike also asserted that over the past decade, IT organizations have squeezed about as much savings as possible out of their budgets; it was now time to focus on solutions that improve business processes in ways that provide significant competitive advantage-for example, reducing sales cycles by 50% or, as in Celina Insurance Group’s experience, providing new, easy-to-use tools that improve business processes and increase productivity.

Also on hand at Lotusphere was Vishal Sikka, SAP’s CTO, who announced a software product being co-developed with IBM. Codenamed Atlantic, it will integrate IBM Lotus Notes with SAP Business Suite. Atlantic does not include integration with Sametime-yet.

Moving to Unified Communications, Bruce Morse, Vice President, Unified Communications Software, announced that Ericsson and NEC will integrate their PBX systems with Sametime. Bruce also announced that Cisco and Nortel are OEM’ing Sametime, and both will sell the combined product through their direct and indirect channels, providing customers more choices when purchasing UC components.

Another important announcement, actually a family of announcements, moves IBM into the SMB market, where the company has not competed well in the past. A software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering codenamed Bluehouse, and a small server, Foundations, are the key piece parts of IBM’s SMB offerings, and they can be mixed and matched to meet customer requirements. Sametime integration will not be part of the initial offering but will follow shortly.

As I was listening to the announcements of new products and enhancements to existing products, and watching one demo after another, I had a recurring thought: IBM is way ahead of Microsoft. The IBM products have been around longer and offer more features and capabilities.

To get a reality check, I spoke with Brent Kelly, Senior Analyst and Partner with Wainhouse Research, who was also attending Lotusphere. Brent will be an instructor for a tutorial at VoiceCon Orlando called “Choices in Unified Communications Solutions: Comparing Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 to IBM Lotus Sametime 8,” so he knows both products well.

Brent told me, “If we compare IBM Lotus Sametime to Microsoft OCS, at a high level both deliver similar functionality to the user. Both provide IM, presence, web conferencing, audio and video, as well as integration with telephony systems. Wainhouse Research’s data tell us that Microsoft is leading with respect to mindshare; however, if we look closer at the overall collaborative offering and strategy, including adjacent capabilities, I would have to say that the IBM offering is richer and much more flexible.”

Another area where IBM is leading Microsoft is in developing a wide range of products and services for the next generation of knowledge workers. Young people entering the workforce expect the same tools they’ve been using in school and in their lives to be in the workplace, and many companies are providing these tools, including some of the new social software capabilities. Look for an upcoming blog on www.nojitter.com by my colleague, Blair Pleasant.

Bottom line: The IBM Lotus team has been busy, developing and enhancing UC and collaborative products. My guess is that they won’t be slowing down any time soon.

What do you think about the coming battle in UC between IBM and Microsoft? Drop me a note at jburton@ustrategies.com or post your comments here in the VoiceCon Unified Communications eWeekly Forum.

Jim Burton
CT-Link and UCStrategies.com

Posted in Applications, Jim Burton, Market Trends, Unified Communications |

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