IBM bags fleet of global comms resellers

Big Blue has enlisted the likes of Cisco, NEC and Nortel as it reaches out for a larger chunk of the unified communications market.

IBM said in a statement yesterday that it has scooped up a number of major original equipment manufacturer (OEM) embedded software and reseller deals, in the expectation it will help plump up customer interest in its Lotus Sametime platform.

The tech giant said it was gunning for millions of corporate customers to adopt the software which is already used by the likes of Colgate Palmolive, HSBC and Prudential UK.

It also claimed that a significant portion (nearly one third) of its news customers were Microsoft Exchange shops.

IBM said that under its new agreement with Cisco the networking giant will sell Lotus Sametime directly and through its UC Advanced Specialised partner channel programme of more than 1,200 global organisations. The firm is also working on plug-ins for Big Blue's UC2 platform.

Meanwhile, Nortel will sell and integrate Lotus Sametime as part of its enterprise unified communications offerings.

The firm said it has also bagged a deal with the world's leading supplier of imaging technology to radiology departments, Carestream Health, which will integrate and sell Lotus Sametime software to provide medical bods with instant messaging and VoIP chats.

Besides the reseller agreements announced by IBM, the tech multinational has also tied up a number of deals with telephony vendors including Ericsson and NEC.

Earlier this week, the firm said it had expanded its suite of software products aimed at the increasingly desirable small biz (SMB) market - a space Microsoft has been keenly eyeing up and punting its wares at of late.

IBM Lotus Foundations will be primarily offered via resellers, said Big Blue. The firm also coughed regarding a managed beta of a web-delivered service - codenamed Bluehouse - for SMBs. ®