A Unified Solution for Communications

An Interview with Cisco and IBM

Recently, BM sat down with Rick McConnell from Cisco and Bruce Morse from IBM, to get an understanding of how they are working together to transform the workspace of the future.

“Our customers are looking for us to provide solutions that better combine the voice, video and data capabilities required to run their business and adapt to change quickly.”
-Bruce Morse, VP Unified Communications Software, IBM

BM. Why are IBM and Cisco partnering in Unified Communications?
Rick McConnell. Customers are embracing Unified Communications as a way to accelerate decisions, gain productivity and strengthen competitive advantage. A Unified Communications solution spans a broad set of technologies, capabilities and investments such as presence, voice, video, data and mobility. Through our partnership we hope to enhance and simplify communication and collaboration by providing advanced solutions that let customers take advantage of existing and future investments in Cisco and Lotus solutions. This increases the value and offers a richer user experience that organizations can expect from using our technologies together.

Bruce Morse. A key finding of IBM’s 2008 Global CEO study was that the majority of CEOs surveyed are focused on adapting their business models to better manage change. As organizations move to more collaborative business models we found our customers looking for us to provide solutions that better combine the voice, video and data capabilities required to run their business and adapt to change quickly. Through our partnership, we can also bring the services skills and expertise that are critical to helping organizations manage change and planning a Unified Communications deployment across such a broad spectrum of technologies. IBM offers these skills through our Converged Communications Services practice with deep expertise not only in the IBM and Cisco products but in planning, managing and implementing Unified Communications solutions.

BM. What are the benefits of Cisco and IBM collaborating to deliver a product integration roadmap?
RM. The current and planned solutions in the product roadmap provide our customers with a robust and integrated user experience across the Cisco and Lotus Unified Communications product portfolios. The integrated product offerings combine IBM Lotus Sametime, IBM Lotus Notes and multiple Cisco Unified Communications products to deliver a complete Unified Communications solution that unify voice, data, video, messaging and mobility technologies into a single, flexible solution. Cisco and IBM customers will benefit from reduced complexity and cost for Unified Communications due to the significant effort we’ve made to develop, integrate, test and support these solutions.

BM. We are combining Cisco’s Unified Communications and networking experience with IBM’s Unified Communications & Collaboration (UC²) and integration expertise to provide users with a superior experience for Unified Communications and collaboration. We offer businesses compatibility between IBM and Cisco products using the open standards based plug-in model for Lotus Sametime that allow for more rapid delivery of functionality, thus helping reducing risk. In addition, our joint partners and services professionals can leverage the Lotus Sametime programming model to develop a larger set of applications and solutions customized to a specific customer environment that offers additional business value to customers.

BM. What are some examples of joint integrations that are having an impact on businesses today?
RM. We have a number of joint customers ranging from large enterprise to the small business that are realizing the benefits of these integrated solutions. The functionality between Cisco and IBM offer immediate benefits by enabling workers to use familiar Lotus applications to access communications capabilities inherent in the Cisco Unified Communications system. Lotus Sametime users can easily place voice or video calls and initiate integrated voice, video and web collaboration sessions from their contact list and instant messaging sessions. You can also see when someone is on the phone and access and manage voicemail directly from the Lotus Sametime client. These capabilities help save time, increase productivity and speed decision making by streamlining communications and enhancing collaboration. IBM Lotus Notes users are able to access, play and delete voice messages directly from their email client. Notes users are also able to accelerate collaboration by setting up and attending voice, video and web conferences from their IBM Lotus Notes calendar.