3/13/2007 -- Longtime companions Cisco Systems Inc. and IBM Corp. were at it again last week, this time announcing their intent to deliver the unified communications and collaboration (UC2) client platform.

The idea, Cisco and IBM officials say, is that such a platform can spur application development by making it easier for code jockeys to include rich communicative and collaborative capabilities in their app-dev projects.

The UC2 platform uses APIs which are currently exposed by IBM as part of its Lotus Sametime collaborative stack; UC2's communication APIs are provided by Cisco, and will support functionality such as voice and video services. The Sametime collaborative capabilities are based on IBM's Lotus Expeditor, which itself consumes technologies from the Open Services Gateway initiative (OSGi) and Eclipse open source projects.

Cisco and IBM plan to eat their own jointly-developed dog food, too: Both companies will adopt the UC2 Client Platform to develop unified communications and collaboration clients. Big Blue's Lotus Sametime 7.5 is based on this platform, for example, and Cisco intends to develop future versions of its Cisco Unified Personal Communicator on top of UC2, too.

Cisco chief development officer Charlie Giancarlo says a unified communications and collaboration infrastructure is of paramount concern to business customers. "Businesses, like a lot of us, are struggling to keep up with the rapid changes taking place in communications," says Giancarlo in an online Q&A. "There are now so many different ways to communicate. There are cell phones, PDAs, e-mail, instant messaging, office phones, virtual meetings, text messaging and now even digital video. But many of these options are stranded in their own technology islands. It's an integration issue. Each communications method typically requires its own device or system. That's putting the onus on the individual employee and the company to coordinate each of these tools. Simple things such as phone number directories must be redundantly entered on each device. People are becoming middleware by having to manage the manual coordination of all their communications tools."

In this respect, UC2 gives organizations a unified way to expose communication and collaboration capabilities to a range of different client devices: Developers can embed communicative and collaborative capabilities in custom applications -- or create composite applications based on communications and collaboration services -- simply by means of plugging into UC2, Cisco and IBM say.

Finally, the two partners plan to deliver specific customer offerings, including a set of "plug-ins" designed to reconcile the communicative and collaborative offerings of both companies. --Stephen Swoyer