IBM Lotus offered the European and North American analyst community an update on its Sametime UC offerings, and the news was very good. With Sametime Unified Telephony now generally available, IBM has a complete unified communications suite--one that allows customers to deploy integrated presence, voice, chat, messaging and conferencing, without requiring that they rip and replace legacy equipment or commit to a single vendor environment.Even before SUT was released, the vendor saw strong uptake of its products. The company boasts more than 140 million entitled users. Of course, that does not parse the number of users who don't have access to Sametime or who are on an older, very limited version of the software--which, let's recall, has been delivered free with Notes for years. But IBM does say it has signed 30 percent more customers in each of the past two years, and one third of those are Microsoft shops (that is, they use Exchange/Outlook for e-mail but went with Sametime for real-time communications).
IBM also has a mix of customer sites. More than 25 of its customers have 100,000 to 400,000 users, and 28 belong to the Fortune 50. Vertically speaking, those customers comprise large pharmaceuticals, banks and telecoms. And the company is taking advantage of the fact that unified communications involves significant work around integration and processes: IBM Converged Communications Services has seen 150 percent growth year over year.
Meanwhile, IBM is using Sametime and SUT internally, with significant results. More than 1,000 IBM employees are using SUT to date, in 50 countries; Bob Hughes, IBM CIO Infrastructure Strategy, says that he expects that number to grow more than tenfold by the end of the year. The main savings are coming from right-sizing the company's voice infrastructure, and supporting home-based and mobile users in the most cost-effective way possible (thanks in part to an interesting partnership with Sprint that maximizes cost savings).
And there's more good stuff, product-wise: Sametime 3D, which is available now in pilot and delivers a Second Life type of collaborative environment for those users that want it (not me, but that's another story); and Sametime Foundations Start, for SMBs. Building on that is Foundations Reach, which is due by the end of the year and will extend UC into the SMB market via a single appliance.
Sametime 8.5, also due at the end of the year, should deliver significantly improved conferencing capabilities that will make launching a conference as easy as an IM (we can all hope, right?); include new Sametime Web browser and mobile IM clients; improve business process integration; and offer better video quality and interoperability.
IBM Lotus continues to deliver mature and robust unified communications products, and customers should seriously consider the new SUT as a great way to enable integrated voice capabilities across multiple vendors' products from any age (TDM or IP). Given that UC will eventually also comprise social networking and Web 2.0 technologies, the vendor is well positioned to continue its product leadership in the years to come (Sametime 3D is a great example of how good the company is at quickly developing new technologies for the market; Connections is a suite of next-gen applications available today.)
I just wish the company would do a better job positioning itself in the ever-competitive market.
