IBM and Microsoft made a number of interesting announcements during their keynote presentations at the VoiceCon conference held in San Francisco this week.

IBM is expanding Lotus Sametime from a single product into a whole product family consisting of:

• IBM Lotus Sametime Entry 8.0
• IBM Lotus Sametime Standard 8.0
• IBM Lotus Sametime Advanced 8.0
• IBM Lotus Sametime “Unified Telephony”

In addition, IBM is joining the already crowded web-conferencing market through the acquisition of WebDialogs. This acquisition is most likely aimed at extending Sametime’s robust behind-the-firewall capabilities onto the public Internet, putting IBM in direct competition with CISCO/WebEx, Citrix/GotoMeeting and Microsoft/LiveMeeting.

Microsoft announced an equally interesting coopetition agreement with Cisco. Both companies CEO’s acknowledged in a joint public discussion that their customers are demanding more flexibility and interoperability when choosing unified communication solutions.

They’re saying, ‘Give me the choice. Don’t give me the all or nothing choice,”‘ Ballmer said, adding that he was seeking “respectful competition” with Cisco.

Technorati Tags: IBM, Microsoft, Cisco, Lotus, Unified Communication, Lotus Sametime

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