Putting its own spin on the excitement over Microsoft’s Office Communications Server 2007 launch, IBM (News - Alert) recently announced new integration between two of its software products in order to deliver a more unified experience for users.

 

The two products in question are Lotus Sametime (IBM’s UC and collaboration platform) and Lotus Symphony (office software suite). The idea behind integrating Sametime and Symphony, IBM said, is to help companies reduce how much they spend on licensing fees for office productivity software. Now, instead of relying on Microsoft (News - Alert) Office apps in order to tie together UC/collaboration and VoIP, companies can use IBM’s integrated solution to achieve the same functionality at a much lower cost.

 

How does this work? It builds on the fact that Lotus Sametime integrates in various ways—through the use of mashups, plugins and creation of open application programming interfaces (APIs)—with other business applications. Users already have the ability, for example, to communicate via IM by clicking a name in a Microsoft Word document, or to set up a VoIP call from within a CRM application simply by clicking on a contact’s name.

 

This type of integration is being taken a step further with IBM’s latest announcement. The new integration delivers an enhanced level of communication functionality to Lotus Symphony. An example of this would be a company whose employees use Lotus Sametime Unyte, IBM’s Web conferencing service to upload presentations and other documents created in Symphony for real-time sharing and collaboration. The same type of functionality works with the Web conferencing capabilities of an on-premise Lotus Sametime installation.

 

The type of integration discussed here is possible because Lotus Sametime is based on the Eclipse open standard, and because IBM publishes open APIs so business partners and customers can create applications that work with, and complement, the features of Sametime. Plus, IBM’s recently launched Sametime Unified Telephony solution work with a variety of PBX systems so businesses can integrate both new and legacy phone systems with their most-used business apps.

 

“Based on my discussions with third party application providers to both IBM Lotus and Microsoft, integrating with Sametime is much easier than integrating with OCS,” said Brent Kelly, an analyst at Wainhouse Research, in a statement. “End users may not see a significant difference, but developers do.”

Michael Rhodin, general manager at IBM’s Lotus Software division, said that the company has removed both barriers to the adoption of open-standards based business productivity apps, and barriers to effective collaboration.

 

“With the integration of Lotus Sametimewith Lotus Symphony, businesses will be able to reach the right people at the right time in the right context, regardless of the business application they are using,” Rhodin said in a statement.

Rhodin’s explanation is not a bad definition of “unified communications” itself. Indeed, IBM noted in its announcement that tying together Sametime and Symphony in this way complements the company’s UC and collaboration strategy. It also fits with IBM’s goal of promoting open standards, especially for UC solutions.

 

Open standards, IBM explained in its announcement, are very important for UC solution adoption since most businesses already have the building blocks in place for a UC environment. These companies are more likely to adopt UC products if doing so doesn’t mean losing millions of dollars of investments by having to do a rip-and-replace. When vendors offer solutions based on open APIs that integrate with existing PBX (News - Alert), audio and video systems from other providers, businesses are more likely to consider becoming a client.

 

Integration between Lotus Sametime and Lotus Symphony is on track for availability starting in the first half of 2008, for customers using Sametime 8.0 and higher.