IBM integrates VOIP

IBM Lotus has introduced partners to help with its efforts to integrate traditional telephony and VOIP with collaboration software via Sametime Unified Telephony Server, which the company says will ship in July, says Network World.

IBM's collaboration and voice strategy is to integrate the telephony architectures companies already have with Sametime and the rest of the IBM Lotus collaboration platform, including Notes/Domino, instant messaging/presence, social networking, conferencing and messaging software.

IBM's integration strategy is in contrast to that of rival Microsoft, which eventually hopes to supplant telephony vendors by re-inventing the PBX in software. It also differs from Cisco, which partners with IBM/Lotus but is taking a more network approach to unified communications.

Motorola and Vocera have agreed to partner their technologies to provide IP-based smartphones and enterprise digital assistants (EDAs) to hospital staff so that they can monitor their patients better, reports EE Herald.

The EDAs from Motorola MC70, MC75, and MC55 will have Vocera's windows mobile supporting software client to provide VoWLAN solutions.

These semi rugged electronic mobile assistants and phones have set of applications tailored for hospital needs, such as medical records in electronics form.

AT&T's chief marketing officer David Christopher says LTE, the successor to the existing GSM network, will make VOIP applications king of the hill, writes Fierce VOIP.

According to AT&T, pricing may go down, since LTE should be less expensive for data than existing 3G solutions. Currently, the HSPA data standard used by AT&T (and other carriers around the world) has had to bridge between cellular and data networks and has a shorter range to boot.

AT&T's reluctance to support VOIP on 3G networks stems from concerns about quality. Because of the way 3G is implemented, it is often too lagged for a natural conversation and is more likely to drop.