IBM Sametime Unyte 8.2

Earlier this month, IBM introduced its newest cloud-based service for web conferencing, Lotus Sametime Unyte 8.2 It should be noted that the cloud-based portion of this "new" offering comes from IBM's acquisition of WebDialogs in August 2007.

Not many would have imagined the big players like IBM, Oracle, Microsoft and SAP move toward cloud-based offerings but it's clear that they need to to compete at the SMB level and even in some case at the enterprise level. EX: Biotech powerhouse, Genentech, is putting a large stake in cloud-based computing as the company has opted to leverage applications from Google for email, calendaring, word processing, and spreadsheets...relieving it's dependence on the likes of IBM and Microsoft. (Genentech still licenses Microsoft Office.) With an estimated $800K investment into the Google application suite, time will tell if the cloud-based model is the future for Genentech.

The obvious challenges for IBM Unyte is that IBM is a laggard in the cloud-based computing arena and WebDialogs was never successful in capturing market share. Cloud computing has already swelled into an estimated $36 billion (USD) market this year, representing roughly 13% of global software sales so I can understand the temptation of IBM going after this market. Perhaps my thinking is too simplistic...no competitive advantage, zero experience with cloud computing, no experienced or proven sales model that knows how to position cloud computing...why compete?

New Enhancements which I have not been able to test:

• Language localization in 9 languages: French, German, Italian, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Brazilian, Portuguese, and English
• Lotus Notes and Lotus Sametime integration with Unyte
• Participant waiting room
• Firefox 3.0 support
• Share PDF's, ODF files, PPT, DOC, and XLS files

Sametime Unyte Pricing:

• $48 per month, 25 attendee capacity
• $75 per month, 50 attendee capacity
• $99 per month, 999 attendee capacity

Thanks,
David Chao
The Web Conferencing Expert

IBM Acquires WebDialogs

IBM has acquired WebDialogs, a web conferencing provider in MA, that has managed to stay in business since its inception in 1998 by offering its services to more established companies to resell under their own brand. Through the acquisition, IBM has rebranded WebDialogs to "Unyte," and will be part of the IBM Software Lotus division.

Financial terms have not been disclosed, which typically means that it is not an amount worth mentioning or touting on the Internet.

I suspect that acquisition was a reaction to Cisco acquiring WebEx this past May for $3.2 billion. IBM has had a foot in the web collaboration space for years now with its IBM SameTime application. SameTime is an on-premise solution that traditionally works well within the firewall but once you try to tunnel out, it's complicated and unreliable.

IBM's positioning is most likely around the fact that they can now offer SameTime to its large enterprise companies while marketing Unyte, a hosted solution, to smaller businesses. This is yet another example of a large enterprise software company trying to get a foothold into the Software as a Service (SaaS) space.

To remain competitive, companies are converging voice, video, and data into a unified communications platform. I understand IBM's collaboration strategy and as much as it is on point, it is difficult to execute strategy with products and applications that have a track record for being cumbersome, unreliable, and not widely accepted in the marketplace. (IBM SameTime has about a 5% market share while WebDialogs has less that 0.01% market share in the web conferencing space)


Thanks,
David Chao
The Web Conferencing Expert