We announced today that we will be enabling integration between the Lotus Symphony product suite and Lotus Sametime and Lotus Sametime Unyte. As always, Akiba does a better job than I could of summarizing why this is important (via InternetNews)
“During an interview with InternetNews.com, Akiba Saeedi, director of IBM’s Unified Communications and Collaboration division, said Big Blue may be gunning for similar synergies but it takes a different approach.
“We believe in openness and open standards for our partners and for customers,” Saeedi said, referring to Lotus Symphony’s support for open source and standards — which come by dint of the productivity’s suite’s basis on OpenOffice.org code. It’s also free.
“That’s fundamentally different from Microsoft, which is taking a proprietary approach,” she added. “We see huge opportunity to bring different types of data together and simplify it from an end-user perspective. Whether they admit it publicly or not, Microsoft want to force licensing on companies to integrate third-party devices.”
The story was also covered by PCWorld:
This week, IBM fired another shot across Microsoft’s bow in announcing that Symphony, Big Blue’s productivity suite announced last month, will integrate with Sametime, its collaboration and unified communications solutions.
And it looks like Bruce has posted the full press release.
Links:
Adam Gartenberg 