By Irwin Lazar, Principal Research Analyst and Program Director, Collaboration and Convergence, March 9, 2007

This week at VoiceCon IBM (NYSE:IBM) and Cisco (NASDAQ:CSCO) announced plans to integrate their unified communications client development, and make their source code freely available. This announcement builds on IBM’s previous release of Sametime 7.5 in September of 2006, which is based on the open-source Eclipse framework. IBM is also offering certification of products developed on its platform, thus providing a guarantee that apps will interoperate. (Third parties who develop products using the Cisco-IBM code must pay licensing fees to bring those products to market). .

The announcement’s important for three reasons: First, by openly providing source code in addition to APIs, IBM and Cisco enable third party developers to rapidly create value-added applications based on the IBM-Cisco unified communications and collaboration client.

Second, it provides enterprises with a credible alternative to Microsoft, which only offers third-party developers with a limited set of APIs, and thereby limits the ability for application innovation.

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