IBM brings together its software platform, technical and business consulting services, server hardware and an extended ecosystem of partners to deliver an end-to-end solution it calls Unified Communications and Collaboration (UC²). According to IBM, this is "the deep intelligent integration of rich presence, instant messaging, email, unified messaging, telephony, Web, audio and video conferencing, delivered through a unified user experience and/or available as a set of contextual services which can be accessed and choreographed within an application or business process."
IBM tackles UC with a best-of-breed approach, enabling partners and third parties to integrate and add on to its open and extensible platform, which leverages the Eclipse open-source framework.
IBM Lotus Sametime is IBM's software platform for unified communications and collaboration, providing:
A unified user experience for services such as aggregated presence, instant messaging, Web conferencing, VoIP, video and incoming call control.
An integration middleware server for simplifying the integration of multi-vendor, multi-technology telephony systems.
An open plug-in model for adding third-party services such as telephony, audio/video conferencing, unified messaging and business applications.
Capabilities include voice chat, dynamic location awareness, the ability to integrate to a Microsoft Outlook environment, multi-platform support, mobile clients, and federation with public IM networks. Call control or telephony capabilities are offered via connections to telephone providers through a variety of partnerships with companies including 3Com, Alcatel-Lucent, Avaya, Cisco, Nortel and Siemens, with more on the way. In addition, Lotus Sametime Unified Telephony, providing integration with a large number of switches, offers this capability directly as part of the IBM Lotus Sametime product family.
In addition to the switch vendors, IBM is working with a wide variety of vendors across a number of categories, including: Tandberg, Polycom, Radvision, and Avistar for video; Premiere and Intercall for hosted audio; and RIM for mobile capabilities.
