Workers will soon be able to move seamlessly from a chat on their computer to a voice conversation on their mobile, saving companies time and money. Voice messages may also become a rarity.
Ericsson is teaming up with IBM to move enterprise customers one step further toward fully unified communications. During the second quarter of this year, the two companies will integrate IBM's Lotus Sametime instant messaging with Ericsson's MX-ONE voice platform - promising customers increased workplace productivity and satisfaction.
The point of the service is ease of use, says Jonas Fritz, a business development executive at IBM in Sweden.
“You may be messaging somebody in Sametime and decide that you want to continue the conversation on the phone,” Fritz says. “All you need to do at that point is to click on an icon to initiate a call from your mobile to the person's mobile, or to their office phone. You're always just one click away.”
Workers who select a contact name in Sametime, or in a Sametime presence-enabled application, can immediately see whether a person they're trying to reach is already on the phone. This also works with Microsoft Outlook.
It helps stressed workers avoid busy signals and voice messages - all distractions that cost time and energy during office hours.
Unified communications provide effective business communications across e-mail, instant messaging, voice, data, video and web-conferencing. The technology can redirect communication to any device, anywhere.
The area of unified communications is a rapidly growing market, driven largely by Microsoft and IBM, says Mats Felldin, a product manager at Ericsson Enterprise.
“By partnering with IBM, Ericsson will be able to extend unified communication capabilities to mobile devices - something our enterprise customers demand in order to make their workers more efficient and flexible,” Felldin says.
Ericsson's unified communications portfolio will also be interoperable with Microsoft OCS 2007. By integrating its products and applications with other market leaders such as IBM and Microsoft, Ericsson wants to help customers move toward converged mobile voice and data services.
Gartner, the US-based technology research firm, identified unified communications as being one of the most important strategic decisions organizations will make in 2008.
