Although this has already been covered by a number of other blogs and this InfoWorld article, this is too big to ignore.

IBM’s Steve Mills (senior vice president of IBM’s software group) and Lotus VP Bruce Morse hosted a press conference earlier this week. At the event, they shared IBM’s strategy for Unified Communication and Collaboration (UC2).

What really caught my attention was how determined IBM Lotus has become to compete seriously in this market. IBM pledged at the event that they will be investing $1B in the Unified Communications market over the next three years.

“Unified communications refers to the combination of instant messaging, Web presence, VoIP, videoconferencing, and other ways workers can collaborate and communicate in real time through one user interface. According to IDC, the market will grow to $17 billion in annual revenue by 2011.”

IBM claims that it currently has 20 million stand-alone Sametime users, and is expecting an annual revenue growth rate, for Unified Communication, of 10% year over year for at least the next five years. We have seen a steady uptick in Sametime deployments at our customers as many companies are finally accepting Enterprise IM and Unified Communication as a business critical application.

I am also happy to note that IBM is reiterating the importance of business partners like Permessa in pursuing this strategy.

“IBM stressed the importance of third-party applications as part of its overall unified communications strategy and its competition with Microsoft.”

Technorati Tags: Unified Communication, UCC, Lotus UCC

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