IBM taps Alcatel for unified communications strategy
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IBM and networking provider Alcatel-Lucent are teaming up to take Microsoft head-on in the unified communications market.Through the partnership, announced in Boston at the Fall VON conference Tuesday, Alcatel-Lucent is offering integration of its OmniTouch audioconferencing feature into IBM Lotus Sametime, the companies said.Customers that have both Alcatel-Lucent&#39;s OmniTouch Unified Communication software and IBM&#39;s Lotus Sametime product can take advantage of the new offering, which will be available in the next few weeks on IBM&#39;s Web site for Sametime partner applications.The move is the first time IBM and Alcatel-Lucent have collaborated on unified communications, though IBM counts other networking providers -- such as Cisco Systems, Avaya, and Nortel Networks -- as partners in this market.IBM is positioning itself as an open-standards alternative to&#160;unified communications offerings from Microsoft, which made a big splash earlier this month in San Francisco when it&#160;launched Office Communications Server, the linchpin of its unified communications strategy. Microsoft also has cozied up to telecommunications companies, as well as&#160;networking and wireless handset providers to push its products in this market.The deal announced Tuesday calls for Alcatel-Lucent and IBM to offer the OmniTouch My Teamwork for Lotus Sametime, a free plug-in that provides the ability to click-to-conference directly from both Lotus Sametime and Lotus Notes, as well as to provide audioconference scheduling and management from Lotus Sametime&#39;s Web conferencing feature.Akiba Saeedi, an IBM program director for unified communications and collaboration, said that&#160;IBM two years ago revamped Sametime&#160;as not only an application, but also a platform on which partners can build new software for unified communications. The company&#39;s open-standards architecture is designed to make it easy for partners such as Alcatel to build software that can plug-and-play directly into the product, she said.Other companies that have built unified communications plug-ins for Sametime include Cisco and Avaya, which have both built click-to-call features for Sametime, and Polycom and Radvision, which also offer audio- and videoconferencing add-ons to Sametime.Microsoft also has tapped some of these same companies to support its Office Communications Server. However, Saeedi said that Microsoft also has built audio and video features into its platform that compete with offerings from its partners. Taking a different tack, IBM wants partners to add value to Sametime and does not plan to build features that compete with plug-ins they provide, she said.
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(InfoWorld) - IBM is looking to better meet the needs of wireless service providers with its planned purchase of network performance monitoring and service management software vendor Vallent. IBM announced Tuesday its intention to purchase privately held Vallent for an undisclosed sum. The vendor hopes to close the deal, subject to regulatory approval, in the first quarter of calendar 2007. At that point, IBM will fold Vallent into its Tivoli Software systems management business unit. Vallent's 200-plus customers includes Bharti Airtel in India, Brasil Telecom, China Mobile CommunicationsÂ and Cingular Wireless as well as mobile equipment providers like Alcatel, Lucent Technologies, and Motorola. The company with headquarters in Bellevue, Washington, employs over 400 staff. IBM plans to add Vallent's software to the Netcool products it gained through the $865 millionÂ acquisition of network management software vendor Micromuse, which closed in February. Bringing the offerings together will better position IBM to provide software to help mobile service providers manage their increasingly complex networks as they converge fixed-line and mobile infrastructure. IBM said there's minimal product overlap between Vallent's products and its existing Tivoli software. The vendor is particularly interested in Vallent's abilities to manage wireless radio access networks, which it expects to mesh well with Netcool's management of wireless infrastructure and Internet Protocol-based services. Â
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Software radio could offer an elegant solution to a vexing problem: how to have a single handset communicate across multiple networks.
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InfoWorld - Sprint-Nextel and Alcatel-Lucent plan to introduce Wednesday a mobile data card that doubles as a laptop security mechanism.
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Alcatel-Lucent opened for business Friday as one of the world's biggest telecom gear makers, signaling a new push into enterprise markets eight months after Alcatel agreed to buy U.S. rival Lucent in a deal worth $11.6 billion.
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Alcatel-Lucent SA has invested in WiMax chip maker Sequans Communications, the latest show of support for the emerging long-range wireless networking technology.
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One ring to rule 'em all IBM and Microsoft are both launching unified communications bundles - software which will allow management of email, VoIP calls, instant messaging, and video conferencing.â¦
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Software radio could offer an elegant solution to what a vexing problem: how to have a single handset communicate across multiple networks.
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Blog: IBM and Cisco Systems announce an expanded alliance, focusing on telecommunications carriers and improvements to monitoring and maintaining networks.
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(InfoWorld) - IBM and Cisco will announce today at the Spring 2007 VoiceCon conference in Orlando, Florida, a joint effort to create an industrywide unified communications and collaboration platform. The expectation is that a single open platform, rather than a potpourri of platforms offered by multiple vendors, will entice a large number of developers to design communications services for the enterprise. In the first step toward that end, IBM and Cisco have pledged to base the new platform, called UC2 (Unified Communication and Collaboration), on Eclipse and OSGi (Open Services Gateway initiative) technologies. In addition, both companies unveiled a series of upcoming offerings jointly developed by the two companies using an open set of APIs from Lotus's Sametime collaboration application and communication APIs from Cisco. Among the solutions planned for later this year are click-to-call and voice mail integration to allow Sametime users to send instant messages to and from Cisco Unified IP phones. Another jointly developed offering will include federated presence information, call history conferencing, and video telephony. The federated presence solution will take information stored in Cisco's IP network, such as availability and location, and share that information with a Sametime client. "If you are looking at a Sametime client, you can see if the phone is not busy and if the person is in, say, building 21 on the third floor," said Barry O'Sullivan, vice president of IP Communications at Cisco. According to Adam Gartenberg, offering manager for the UC2 Software division of IBM Lotus Software Group, the growth of unified communications services has been impeded by a lack of a consistent programming environment. On the other hand, the ubiquity of Eclipse will encourage the large Eclipse community of developers to design communications services that extend the client capabilities of ERP and CRM applications to remote users. "The UC2 platform is extensible, allowing developers to create plug-ins or mini applications to access applications remotely," said Gartenberg. For example, a developer might extend an expense approval application in SAP by creating an applet that makes it available in an instant messaging environment. There is also no doubt that enterprise-level companies are eager to see what unified communications can do for them. Ray Repic, chief technical architect at Coca-Cola Enterprises, says he likes the idea of leveraging his existing technology to create incremental value. Repic already uses Lotus SameTime and Cisco's IP telephony. "There's nothing we need to purchase," said Repic. In addition Repic said he is eager to get it up into Coca Cola's prototyping lab.Â  "We need to understand how we can use voice as an application," Repic said. As part of the announcement, Cisco also said that it will develop future versions of its Unified Personal Communicator on the new UC2 client platform. Also planned is a certification program to certify that the solutions developed on UC2 platform meet the specifications laid out by IBM and Cisco. However, despite the cooperation between Cisco and IBM and the stated reasons for it, analysts see Microsoft as the elephant in the room.Â  "The unified communications battle will come down to Cisco versus Microsoft," said Yankee Group analyst Zeus Kerravala. Some users have held off on the technology because they are waiting to see what Microsoft will do with it, he said. Meanwhile, Nortel Networks, which last year announced a partnership with Microsoft in this area, hasn't ended up with much of an advantage that other telephony vendors don't have, Kerravala said.
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Siemens technology to be built into IBM's Lotus Sametime software to enable integrated telephony and presence features.
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SAN FRANCISCO - U.S. wireless operators have created a plan for MMS (Multimedia Messaging Services) interoperability across networks, the Cellular Telecommunications & Internet Association (CTIA) announced Tuesday.
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Joint work with IBM is part of strategy to deliver apps that let customers use Web services to build adaptable service-oriented architectures.
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Motorola will partner with NTT DoCoMo, Japan&#39;s largest wireless carrier, to create a next-generation wireless handset based on DoCoMo&#39;s FOMA technology.
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IBM Corp. is hoping to broaden the appeal of its Sametime enterprise IM software by expanding the current stand-alone offering into a family of products in a bid to better compete with other unified communications players like Microsoft and Cisco.
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Missouri's Lincoln University has deployed Alcatel-Lucent's higher education offering to transform its campus-wide communications network. The new network enables the university to offer a secure, 'always on' learning environment, and streamline communications among administrators and staff.
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Two vendors are releasing products for the enterprise that enable what they claim is seamless switching between cellular and standard voice-over-IP calls.