IBM Invests $1 Billion in Unified Communications - The company wants to outpace Microsoft, its most important rival on the market

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IBM has announced that the company is committed to investing $1 billion in its unified communications strategy for a three-year period. The move will allow the Big Blue to continue the battle with
Microsoft on a market that is developing rapidly.

According to Steve Mills, senior vice president of IBM's software group, the company will continue to invest in software such as the Lotus Sametime suite, in order to provide unified communications to the company's largest business customers. However, developing the Sametime suite would allow IBM to improve its Lotus Notes collaboration software, given the fact that the latter is using the Sametime unified communications client.

The unified communications market is comprised of a combination of services such as instant messaging, Web presence, voice over Internet Protocol, videoconferencing, and other services that allow users to keep in touch and collaborate in real time, using a single interface for all the tasks. Microsoft has pressured IBM with the advent of its latest offering, the Office Communications Server suite.

However, IBM's product is totally different from Microsoft's offering: if the Office Communications Server suite can only work in a Windows-based environment, the Sametime product is able to support heterogeneous IT environments. IBM demonstrated yesterday some new functionalities that will be bundled with the Sametime suite until the end of 2008. the Unified telephony service would allow users to call another co-worker using the Sametime interface by routing calls to various devices. More than that, the user can set rules on how to handle calls based on status: working remotely would direct calls to a mobile phone, for instance.

According to Mills, despite the fact that Microsoft always boasts the fact that the Outlook/Exchange suite wins over IBM's Lotus Notes, the things are not quite exactly accurate. Mills claims that Lotus is gaining share in the "market where we compete with Microsoft," namely the business and corporate sectors.

"Microsoft makes a bunch of statements that are somewhat misleading in terms of what is happening," he said. The company expects 10 percent more revenue in the unified communications business year-over-year.