NEW YORK — IBM
Customers will also be able to drag charts derived from business
The client also supports VoIP
Mike Rhodin, general manager of IBM Lotus Software, emphasized that this is
He said that there are already more than a dozen plug-ins from IBM
The company can add so many new features so quickly, he said, because
That means Big Blue can benefit from the work of hundreds of partners rather
The company demonstrated one plug-in from French-based Dassault Systemes
Rhodin said that IBM will be providing a virtual partner showcase where
“It’s the collaborative applications built on Notes that make the platform
IBM sees real-time collaboration as a huge opportunity for growth.
Because real-time collaboration involves so many disparate technology
Rhodin said the platform represents a market opportunity of several tens of
Forrester analyst Matthew Brown agreed with that assessment, while Gartner
Regardless of the exact dollar figure, IBM sees it as the jumping-off spot
“We’re using this launch as the next leg of our expansion,” Rhodin told
IBM has certainly gotten the jump on Microsoft
Microsoft has also announced several features of its own real-time collaboration tool, Office
The two companies lock horns in several areas, including the asynchronous
Brown said that Microsoft’s SharePoint Server has been trouncing IBM’s
But IBM is not of a mind to let Microsoft get a jump in this market, Brown
“IBM wants to own the real-time stuff.”
IBM not only has the advantage of being first to market, he added, but is looking to recuperate in real-time
collaboration what it has lost in asynchronous workplace tools.
The Armonk, N.Y.-based software and services vendor today announced that
real-time collaboration platform Sametime 7.5 is available.
Sametime 7.5 features secure enterprise chat, Web conferencing and
document-sharing capabilities.
intelligence applications into the chat window; the charts remain hooked up
to their respective business applications and are updated in real time if
the underlying data changes.
can be used on a variety of mobile devices.
not simply an upgrade from Sametime 7.0, but rather the birth of a new
platform.
partners available immediately, with more than a hundred more scheduled for
release later this year.
Sametime 7.5 was built on an open source Eclipse-based foundation, rather
than with proprietary code.
than relying simply on its own developers.
, which allows users to not only drag a 3-D graphic into
the chat interface, but also allows them to do 3-D rendering in the client
itself.
customers can find examples of applications built by partners.
successful,” he told internetnews.com.
sectors, including VoIP, wireless and mobile devices and video conferencing,
it’s difficult to put a dollar figure on the market potential.
billions of dollars.
offered a much more conservative assessment earlier this year, putting the market at somewhere north of $1 billion.
for its next phase of growth.
internetnews.com. by
launching this product just nine months after announcing it.
Communications Server, but doesn’t intend to launch until sometime next
year.
workplace collaboration space.
Workplace collaboration suite in recent months, going from 40 million
licensed users in December 2005 to 70 million last June.
“Workplace has not seen that level of attraction,” Brown told
internetnews.com.
said, and is now four or five months ahead of the Redmond, Wash.-based
software vendor in real-time collaboration.
can promise to deliver new applications more quickly because of its partner
strategy.
“You’re placing a bet on who is going to innovate more quickly,” Brown said. “I would suggest that partners working on open source will move faster.”
IBM Beats Microsoft to Meeting Space
