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 Channel Futures

Best Practices


Surprise Winner In Unified Communications Race

  • Written by The VAR Guy 1
  • June 12, 2007

Cisco, Nortel, 3Com and other networking rivals are in a unified communications horse race. Most odds makers favor Cisco to win, with the rest of the field hoping to place or show. But a surprise entrant — one of the tech industry’s oldest names — could benefit most from unified communications.

IBM — yes, Big Blue — actually has a very compelling unified communications strategy. Admittedly, IBM exited the networking market in the 1990s after a dismal performance against Cisco. (Anybody else remember the APPN vs. APPI battles?) This time around, IBM is partnering aggressively to get into the networking game.

And right now, the world of networking is focused on unified communications — which marries voice, video and IP traffic onto a single network. It paves the way for powerful applications, including so-called TelePresence video conferencing.

Already, IBM is working with Nortel to offer unified communications to small and midsize businesses. Big Blue also has a partnership with 3Com to offer unified communications on IBM’s System i servers — the successor to IBM’s AS/400 systems. And not to be forgotten, IBM is working with Cisco on some unified communications projects.

So regardless of which unified network hardware you embrace, IBM’s software, hardware and services teams will be in the running for some related business. Basically, IBM has decided to ride every major horse in the unified communications race. Not a bad strategy.

Tags: Agents Cloud Service Providers MSPs VARs/SIs Best Practices Networking

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4 comments

  1. Avatar Eric Friedman June 13, 2007 @ 3:36 am
    Reply

    I totally disagree. IBM is a niche player in unified communications. This is Cisco vs. Microsoft. Everybody else is a pretender.

  2. Avatar LT June 13, 2007 @ 6:23 am
    Reply

    I don’t know about you, but the VARGuy certainly sounds like a man that has placed a bet or two on a pony. My point, he should know it’s not how many ponies you ride, but if you ride the right ones.

    One big tech giant left off the IBM list was MSFT, meaning clearly IBM believes the network is the platform for UC and not the edge. That is a huge win for Cisco.

    And we wouldn’t be at the track without a sleeper…what about HP? They have UC relationships with both MSFT and Cisco.

  3. Avatar Stephen King June 13, 2007 @ 1:34 pm
    Reply

    UC, it depends on who is defining it… the e-mail/calendaring vendors, data networking vendors, telephone vendors? Then it is an Exchange/Domino play, admittedly Exchange being more popular but Domino not releasing it significant hold on the enterprise. If it is IM view? Then you have all the public IM vendors (yahoo, msn, aol, etc), but if it’s corporate IM… then Sametime’s got a huge lead. Microsoft’s of course going to challenge that with it’s LCS/OCS offers for small to medium business and go after enterprise as well.

    UC depends on your perspective. All vendors call their solution unified. It is the latest buzz word. There is so much overlap with all the vendors coming out with Click-to-whatever (call, conference, talk, yada yada yada) – not to mention the confusion over UM – Unified Messaging.

    To have a single inbox or to keep separate voice mail and e-mail inboxes, which to choose? There are those that say, put it all together, it is cheaper and more productive. And those that use legal discoverability as a reason to keep voice mail and e-mail separate. It is all discoverable, regardless of what storage server. It is all ESI… electronically stored information, in the eyes of the Fed. The UM arguments will continue as long as lawyers make money billing the executives about their opinions on the topic.

    When it comes to IBM? IBM plays with each of the UC/networking/telephony players, again, depending upon your perspective.

    IBM makes a significant amount of income on it’s services in the Microsoft space, in addition to it’s Unified Communications/VoIP alliances with Cisco, and Avaya, it’s two alliance leaders.

    IBM also has new niche products coming in from 3Com and Nortel for the iSeries (AS400) customer base. And don’t forget IBM’s huge integration business with Siemens in Europe.

    IBM is not only playing in the “unified” space, but relying on “diversified” as well. It is going to take a while for the dust to settle with all the overlapping solutions.

  4. Avatar John Johnson February 21, 2009 @ 6:28 am
    Reply

    Keep working, great job!

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