IBM, Cisco Unveil Platform

ORLANDO, Fla. -- IBM(NYSE: IBM) and Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) today announced their intent to delivera new platform for unified communications and collaboration clientdevelopment. Based on open technologies such as Eclipse and OSGi, theplatform will accelerate application development by enabling developers toeasily include a rich set of communications and collaboration capabilitiesin their solutions.Additionally, the companies announced plans to deliver specific customerofferings including a joint solution based on the new client platform and aset of "plugins" that bring together the communications and collaborationcapabilities of both companies.

At the core of the unified communications and collaboration (UC2) ClientPlatform will be an open set of application programming interfaces (APIs)offered by IBM as a subset of Lotus Sametime collaboration capabilitiesalong with communication APIs provided by Cisco to access communicationsfunctionality such as voice and video services. The Lotus Sametimecollaboration capabilities are built on IBM's Lotus Expeditor, whichcontains open technologies from OSGi and Eclipse. This allows customers andpartners to build new classes of applications and services that are easilymanaged and run across desktops, laptops, web browsers, and mobile devices.

Cisco and IBM will adopt the UC2 Client Platform to develop their ownunified communications and collaboration clients. Lotus Sametime 7.5 isbased on this platform and IBM plans that future releases will continue totake advantage of the platform. Cisco also intends to develop futureversions of its Cisco Unified Personal Communicator client based on thisclient platform.

In a separate release:

ORLANDO, Fla. --Highlighting customer and partner demand for interoperability in the unifiedcommunications market, Cisco Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ: CSCO) today announced itis expanding Microsoft(R) interoperability to provide collaborativereal-time capabilities for customers using Cisco Unified Communicationssolutions with Microsoft Exchange 2007, Microsoft Live Communications Server2005, and Microsoft Office Communicator. In addition, Cisco confirmed thatits broad portfolio of Unified Communications solutions will supportMicrosoft Windows Vista and Internet Explorer (IE) 7.0."Cisco provides an open approach to unified communications, allowingcustomers to integrate a variety of application vendors, such as Microsoft,into their business environment," said Zeus Kerravala, senior vice presidentof enterprise research, Yankee Group. "It is clear that Cisco is partneringwith Microsoft in unified communications to offer deep integration to jointcustomers."

IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM)

Cisco Systems Inc.