By Irwin Lazar, Principal Analyst and Program Director, Collaboration and Convergence, Nemertes Research

Sept. 21, 2006

This week IBM (NYSE:IBM, http://www.ibm.com) formally announced version 7.5 of its Lotus SameTime real-time communications platform. IBM's announcement demonstrates the growing importance of the real-time communications dashboard, as evidenced as well by a recent Nemertes Research benchmark indicating that enterprises were willing to pay an average of $437 a seat for such capabilities.

IBM's announcement accomplishes two major objectives. First, they provide the sixteen million or so current users of SameTime with a real-time communications dashboard, enabling them to integrate voice, presence, instant messaging, video and conferencing into a single user interface. Secondly, they demonstrated a renewed commitment to the real-time communication and collaboration space, providing an alternative to recent market momentum around Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT, http://www.microsoft.com/), and its Office Communicator/Office Communications Server 2007 announcements.

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