Cisco and IBM: enhancing the way people work through unified communications

By Rick McConnell, Cisco, VP Market Development and Bruce Morse, IBM, VP UC & Collaboration Software

The virtual workplace is more than just a vision for the future. It is here today. Customers, partners, suppliers and other constituents must effectively collaborate across organizations and time zones in order to be successful in this global, real-time environment.

Unified Communications represents a comprehensive network-based communications solution that enables more effective, more secure and more personal communications. It connects users in the way that is most suitable for them at a given time. It is flexible enough to allow users to communicate across and between applications as interactions warrant, independent of where they are or what device they are using. These capabilities help enable collaboration and accelerate decision making and productivity. The primary components of a Unified Communications strategy include real time, near time and stored communications such as IP telephony, voice, video and Web conferencing, collaboration, instant messaging and unified voice and email messaging. All are underpinned by services such as secure access, rich presence information about your current location, activity and availability, and communication preferences to optimize interactions.

Results documented by a Chadwick Martin Bailey Research study conducted in May 2008 demonstrate that Unified Communications solutions deliver many benefits that enhance employee communications. The top three benefits realized are simplified communications (77%), enhanced productivity (76%) and faster communications (73%). Additionally, the study found that 64% of users save up to 30 minutes daily as a result of being able to reach employees reliably on the first try. Other benefits include:

• Avoiding time wasted on attempts to reach unavailable staff
• Simplifying communications to improve long-term productivity, business process reform and financial performance
• Improving decision-making through faster collaboration

Unified Communications requires an integrated communications strategy and architecture – enabling the secure combination of voice, video, mobility and collaborative applications within a robust, intelligent network. With its industry-leading breadth of solutions, its world-class partnerships, and its understanding of how to map technology to address business challenges, Cisco is able to fulfill the promise of Unified Communications. The Cisco approach to Unified Communications is founded on the company’s worldwide market leadership in telephony and networking.

The IBM approach to Unified Communications and Collaboration (UC 2)™ is based on its long-standing leadership in collaborative applications and converged communications services that can transform and optimize core business processes. IBM embraces the heterogeneous characteristics of today’s organizations, delivering an open and extensible software platform that integrates rich presence, IM, email, unified messaging, Web, voice, video, telephony and business applications. Fostering innovation and business agility by making it easier for people to find, reach and collaborate through a Unified Communications experience is the key tenet of the IBM UC 2 strategy. IBM consultants and architects have the expertise and experience from working with hundreds of clients, big and small, private sector and public; integrating multi-vendor solutions and minimizing the risks in making these solutions work.

Cisco and IBM have a long established track record of working together to provide customers with innovative business solutions. Together, the two companies are enabling a new way of communicating and collaborating – one that’s open, timely, and effective. Using best in class Unified Communications capabilities from both Cisco and IBM, organizations can transform their business processes and reach new levels of productivity. Collaboration will be made easier and communications will be enhanced. Individuals and teams will work more effectively – when, where and how they choose – without sacrificing security or productivity.

A Winning Approach

Cisco and IBM are working together to deliver faster time to value and a rich user experience across their Unified Communications portfolios. In addition, IBM can provide planning, implementation and management services to enable Cisco and IBM customers to accelerate the adoption of Unified Communications and IP Telephony solutions.

Integrated Product Offerings

The combination of Cisco® Unified Communications and networking solutions and expertise with IBM’s Unified Communications and Collaboration products and services provides users with an exceptional user experience and allows for rapid delivery of functionality and value. The integrated product offerings combine IBM Lotus® Sametime®, IBM Lotus Notes® and multiple Cisco Unified Communications products to deliver a complete Unified Communications solution that unifies voice, data, video, messaging, and mobility technologies into a single, flexible solution.

Additionally, IBM provides services for the implementation of the Unified Communications solution. IBM Converged Communications Services offer an architected best-practices approach to the deployment of a Unified Communication and collaboration solution into clients’ infrastructures. The service offerings from IBM can assist clients in designing and deploying fully integrated unified messaging, real-time collaboration and Cisco TelePresence™ solutions that combine presence, data, voice and video communications, while addressing key concerns for an enterprise, such as security, availability and scalability. IBM Global Services has the experience and global resources to help clients successfully deploy their Unified Communications solution and help ensure interoperability with related collaboration software, corporate applications, back-end systems and the corporate directory to deliver the greatest business value .

The following Solution Case Studies are provided as examples of just two of a number of solutions that are available from Cisco and IBM to enable workforce collaboration – additional solutions can be accessed through the web links at the end of the article.

Solution Case Study: Cisco Unified Communications with IBM Lotus Sametime

Cisco Unified Communications with IBM Lotus Sametime provides deep integration among key components of the Cisco Unified Communications system and IBM Lotus Sametime. Lotus Sametime users can easily place voice or video calls and initiate integrated voice, video and Web collaboration sessions from their contact list and Instant Messaging (IM) sessions. You can also see when someone is on the phone and access and manage voicemail directly from the Lotus Sametime client. These capabilities help save time, increase productivity and speed decision making by streamlining communications and enhancing collaboration. Implemented as a suite of modular plugins, Cisco Unified Communications with IBM Lotus Sametime provides customers with the flexibility to use the full suite or choose the individual capabilities that best fit their needs.

Messaging is a mainstay of enterprise communications. However, having siloed messaging solutions can limit access to critical communications and slow down workflow. Cisco Unified Messaging solutions integrate with the Lotus Notes email client so you can handle all your messages – email, voicemail, and fax – easily and conveniently, whether you are in the office or on the road. Having a single, visual interface to access all message types helps you identify and respond to high priority messages.

Virtual meeting solutions let people meet at any time from anywhere without the expense and inefficiencies of traveling. Cisco WebEx® meeting applications and Cisco Unified MeetingPlace® are integrated with Lotus Notes to allow users to easily access rich media conferencing tools from their Notes calendar. Being able to easily set up and attend virtual meetings helps promote their adoption and accelerate collaboration .

Summary

IBM and Cisco are driving innovation in collaboration and communications by responding to customer demand for tighter integration between IBM and Cisco offerings. As Unified Communications applications become increasingly prevalent in the workplace, organizations are realizing business value through better communications and collaboration capabilities. They are discovering how they can be more creative and bring communities together by offering communication and collaboration options that fit users’ individual work preferences.

Cisco and IBM are strategic alliance partners that have a strong track record of working together to deliver benefits to businesses. Both companies are actively working to further enhance capabilities across a number of product and service areas to provide organizations with maximum flexibility in deploying Unified Communications solutions.

By integrating their products, jointly promoting an open, standards-based client technology, and using the open developer community, Cisco and IBM will enable customers to use existing infrastructure investments and deliver new productivity applications to streamline communications. And, IBM will provide services to help customers maximize the value of their investments.

Additional Information

Please visit these Web sites for additional information:

• Cisco Unified Communications: www.cisco.com/go/unifiedcommunications
• IBM Unified Communications and Collaboration: www.ibm.com/lotus/uc2
• IBM & Cisco Alliance on Cisco.com: www.cisco.com/go/ibm and unified communications homepage
• IBM & Cisco Alliance on IBM.com: www.ibm.com/solutions/cisco

Additionally, Cisco and IBM are proud to present a webcast titled: “Changing the game - Collaboration for strategic advantage” in which Tom Malone, the Patrick J. McGovern Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Along with Cisco and IBM executives have a thought provoking discussion on the cultural impact of collaboration and its strategic implications for your business in the new century. Please visit the following Web site to register and attend:

• www.IBMCiscoCollaborate.com/register