IBM is announcing a self-managing, "office in a box" appliance for small and midsized businesses, a market niche IBM last counted itself a member of in, oh, 1916 or so.
The product, IBM Lotus Foundations Reach, available for purchase next month, combines unified communications and collaboration tools for running a business with "the ability to connect to telephony" in a single product. It's marketed to that chronic SMB sweet spot, needing a way to overcome limited in-house IT expertise -- Big Blue says it "reduces complexity and enables employees to access people and information."
The new Lotus Foundations Reach, IBM officials say, "customizes and extends the IBM Sametime UC(2) capabilities in a single appliance designed specifically for SMBs that have limited IT skills and smaller budgets. In about an hour, a business can install and configure its entire UC environment in a system small enough to fit under a desk."
The product is designed with an eye to minimizing the need for human intervention with self-managing technology that automates IT tasks such as adjusting to workload demands, conducting proactive system checks for security and reliability of the network, and detecting and repairing potential issues. To more closely approximate a corporate IT department it also wears dashikis, knows all the lines to Monty Python & The Holy Grail and is using company time and resources to invent a remote-controlled, all-terrain drive beer caddy.
The product combines UC features such as instant messaging, presence awareness to see who is online and available, e-mail, calendars, contacts, office productivity tools, network security, remote access, file and print sharing, and backup and disaster recovery accessible from a mobile device.
In early April TMC's Michael Dinan reported that IBM unveiled a series of enterprise voice collaboration tools that includes new software, services and business partners.
"Officials at IBM say their solutions center around so-called IBM Lotus Sametime Unified Telephony and will help businesses use unified communications to save money and work more efficiently," Dinan reported: "According to Laurence Guihard-Joly, vice president integrated communications services at IBM global technology services, the company plans to work with clients to build 'robust unified communications environments' using almost any telephony equipment."
京公網安備 11010502049343號