"IBM chose Siemens OpenScape technology because of its interoperability with multiple PBX systems and track record of innovation and vision in this field," said Bruce Morse, vice president, unified communication and collaboration, IBM. "Our companies share the goal of developing extensible unified communications solutions that are based on open standards and integrate seamlessly into business processes."
Under the agreement, IBM will license elements of OpenScape software and integrate them within IBM Lotus Sametime "Unified Telephony" software, the recently announced addition to IBM's industry leading unified communications and collaboration strategy. By incorporating OpenScape technology, Lotus software users will benefit from easy to use communications tools within the applications they already use regardless of their back-end telephony systems.
Another important enterprise IT benefit is that incorporating OpenScape technology into the Lotus Sametime "Unified Telephony" offering will enable Lotus customers to decouple their unified communications investments from their PBX infrastructure. This makes a single, consistent communications image across a heterogeneous telephony environment possible. As a result, IT departments will no longer need to manage a range of varied, vendor-dependent approaches to unified communications. Furthermore, they can make application integration decisions based on business needs, not PBX capabilities.