My overall take on the show should be posted to Collaboration Loop shortly, but I wanted to share a few thoughts here as well.
Walking the partner pavilion yesterday I was struck by the prominent presence of telephony vendors such as Avaya, Cisco, Nortel, Siemens, and others. I can imagine that the Notes/Domino crowd looked at these VOIP vendors much in the same way as the PBX managers looked at Microsoft and IBM on the show floor at VoiceCon a few years ago - e.g. "What the heck are these guys doing here?"
But the reality is that the worlds of telephony, video, IM, and collaboration are rapidly converging. Of the three major announcements made by Lotus this week, two of them tied directly into unified communications, these included enhancements to Sametime, and the new Quickr application which enables integration of Sametime with document management applications. IBM even extended the term "Unified Communications" to include Collaboration, coining the new term UC^2. During the opening general session they even demonstrated the capabilities that telephony partners such as Avaya, Siemens, and Cisco are bringing to the Sametime environment. Mike Gotta of Burton, Brent Kelly of Wainhouse, and myself seemed to be in violent agreement about these trends during our appearance as part of the unified communications keynote yesterday morning.
It was also pretty clear that IBM Lotus is positioning itself against Microsoft on the basis of multi-platform support (including Mac and Linux clients), as well as more openness in the Sametime platform, including XMPP federation, and the Eclipse open source development platform. IBM stated that unlike Microsoft, they weren't going after the telephony market, which should come as good news to their partners. I got the sense that Cisco and IBM are increasingly moving closer together, arguably in response to the Nortel/Microsoft alliance.
So the event was a worthwhile one to attend. It gave me a pretty good feeling about the evolution of sametime, and it further reinforced the convergence around communications and collaboration that I've been writing about for the last two and a half years.
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