IBMs Unified Communications and Collaboration Quest

Citing IDC figures, IBM claims UCC will top $17 billion by 2011. IBM plans to capitalize on the growth potential with products such as Sametime Advanced, a product that adds social networking tools and persistent chat to IBM’s Sametime Web conferencing and instant messaging software.

So how big is the UCC market now? It’s still very early for true UCC solutions, according to Bruce Morse, IBM’s vice president of UCC. “Unification across the communications silos to the point where you’re mixing together voice, video, data, etc. with context is still in very much in an embryonic stage in terms of what people are doing.”

IBM Senior Vice President Steve Mills says Big Blue’s UCC focus is on providing “carrier-grade” solutions–ubiquitous and highly reliable, and scalable to thousands of users. Translation: This isn’t going to be cheap. IBM wants you to license Sametime and get its global services team embedded like termites to support the client software.

IM will become the core extension point for multimodal communications, allowing workers to click to call–or even click to Web conference-co-workers from all over the world.

Currently, businesses toil in a walled-garden business model of siloed communications applications. This will gradually change as vendors forge interoperability standards that let employees collaborate across disparate business and public domains.

Imagine using your Sametime application to set up a virtual meeting. Morse told eWEEK this will be possible in three to five years, as IBM is testing ways to integrate Sametime with virtual reality software, where employee avatars can assemble in virtual conference rooms. Sametime will let users invite other participants and communicate with Web conferencing.

For example, IBM and virtual reality software maker Forterra Systems are programming a Sametime-based UCC solution, code-named Babel Bridge, that could allow U.S. intelligence agencies to use a common graphical collaboration system to communicate within a virtual world.

Another IBM partner, VBrick Systems, is introducing the VBrick Lotus Sametime Video Plug-in, which streams live broadcasts and digital video content within the Sametime environment to users for collaboration.

IBM is ramping up its growth in UCC to meet challengers such as Microsoft, which launched its Office Communications Server 2007 last year. But IBM exexcutives including Mills claim Microsoft’s UCC scope is limited because it is Windows-based, whereas IBM promises to enable UCC for “all of the information within the enterprise or beyond the enterprise if the customer deems appropriate.”

IBM acquired WebDialogs in August to flesh out its UCC strategy. Mills said IBM may make incremental acquisitions to improve integration with other products or platforms. However, the bulk of the portfolio is in place to lead IBM into the future of UCC.