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IBM Lotus and Microsoft differ more in terms of their approach to telephony and in their partner philosophy than in their UC functions.
IBM Lotus Sametime and Microsoft Live Communications Server/Office Communications Server 2007 are the two most widelydeployed, premises-based enterprise unified communications systems-loosely defined for these purposes as a system that includes elements of presence, instant messaging, voice and/or voice conferencing, Web conferencing, mobility, unified messaging, and/or videoconferencing, all integrated through a common user interface and experience. Also, for the purposes of this article, we lump Microsoft Office Live Communications Server and Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 together for simplicity, and henceforth will refer to them collectively as Office Communications Server or OCS.
We estimate that there are between 16 and 18 million paid Lotus Sametime licenses, based on information from IBM Lotus, while Microsoft OCS/LCS has somewhere between 10 and 20 million clients deployed (we have no indicators from Microsoft regarding how many clients are deployed and how many are paid licenses).
To put these numbers in perspective, this installed base of roughly 30-40 million unified communications clients represents less than 5 percent of the addressable market. With so many more desktop, laptop and PDA clients still to be converted to unified communications, the stakes are high, and Microsoft and IBM Lotus both want a dominant share of this emerging market.
These companies are regarded as fierce competitors in any market they choose to enter. Both are well capitalized, and they are ramping up their development and sales/marketing teams in order to seek significant revenue in the unified communications market.
This article compares the unified communications solutions offered by these two giants.
Significant Functional Differences
There are many differences between OCS and Sametime-but when you take into account the contributions made by each vendor's partners, there is little that OCS can do that can't be done with Sametime, and vice versa. There are, however, some notable exceptions.
A major difference is that Sametime can be deployed on multiple operating systems, including Windows, whereas OCS will only play in a Windows Server environment. Furthermore, Sametime integrates with Outlook and other Microsoft Office applications, but OCS does not integrate with Lotus Notes.
On the other hand, OCS allows Office Communicator 2007's IP voice and...