IBM and Cisco have announced their intent to deliver a new platform for unified communications and collaboration client development. Based on open technologies such as Eclipse and OSGi, the platform will accelerate application development by enabling developers to easily include a rich set of communications and collaboration capabilities in their solutions.
Additionally, the companies announced plans to deliver specific customer offerings including a joint solution based on the new client platform and a set of “plugins” that bring together the communications and collaboration capabilities of both companies.
At the core of the unified communications and collaboration (UC2) Client Platform will be an open set of application programming interfaces (APIs) offered by IBM as a subset of Lotus Sametime collaboration capabilities along with communication APIs provided by Cisco to access communications functionality such as voice and video services. The Lotus Sametime collaborations capabilities are built on IBM’s Lotus Expeditor, which contains open technologies from OSGi and Eclipse. This allows customers and partners to build new classes of applications and services that are easily managed and run across desktops, laptops, web browsers, and mobile devices.
Cisco and IBM will adopt the UC2 Client Platform to develop their own unified communications and collaboration clients. Lotus Sametime 7.5 is based on this platform and IBM plans that future releases will continue to take advantage of the platform. Cisco also intends to develop future versions of its Cisco Unified Personal Communicator client based on this client platform.
In addition, the two companies intend to work together to promote the benefits of open technologies for development and will drive market adoption of the UC2 Client Platform among customers and partners. These activities are expected to include training, enablement and certification programs for developers, ISVs and unified communication providers.
A significant number of customers, developers, distributors and communications providers have already expressed their support for the UC2 Client Platform, including Berbee, Citrix Systems, Coca-Cola Enterprises, Nokia, Optimus, Presidio Networked Solutions, PSC Group, Radvision and Research in Motion.