Last week's IBM Lotus announcement of its roadmap for Sametime version 8, coupled with other developments, positions IBM as a growing competitor in the rapidly emerging unified-communications market. The time is ripe for vendors to bolster their unified communications offerings, considering 79% of enterprises are deploying or evaluating products to support a Unified-Communications strategy, according to Nemertes' Building the Successful Virtual Workplace benchmark.

Several new features will emerge for Sametime. First, IBM Lotus plans to offer a dedicated telephony client based on technology licensed from Siemens Enterprise Communications. Second, it will have a hosted Web-conferencing service, resulting from its acquisition of privately held WebDialogs. Third, IBM Lotus and Polycom announced video integration between Sametime and Polycom Unified Collaboration for Lotus Sametime and Lotus Notes.

The unified-communications market has gained considerable interest over the last year, with vendors including Cisco, Microsoft, Nortel, and Avaya greatly expanding their offerings and partnerships.

But most enterprises are basing their UC plans around their desktop environment, meaning applications such as Microsoft Office Communicator and IBM Lotus Sametime become a real-time communications dashboard, providing centralized control for a disparate set of real-time and non-real time collaboration applications. IBM has moved aggressively to counter Microsoft in this space, establishing a growing list of partnerships and capabilities to offset Microsoft's own initiatives around Office Communications Server 2007 and related applications.

Nemertes sees the following impacts:

For Enterprises - Competition is good. IBM Lotus and Microsoft present compelling but distinct approaches toward unified communications architectures. Evaluate both platforms as part of your UC strategy development.

For Service Providers - Deliver products and services that integrate with Microsoft and/or IBM Lotus platforms including integration of hosted applications such as compliance management, conferencing, service and support for integration of enterprise platforms, and hosted federation/peering services.

For Investors - Successful companies will integrate rather than seek to compete with Microsoft and IBM desktop environments. Look for opportunities in middleware vendors such as privately held LiteScape Technologies and BlueNote Networks, that bring value to UC applications by providing interfaces with enterprise application environments.