Sametime Unified Telephony Progress ReportSametime Unified Telephony Progress Report

SUT starts off small, but some big enterprises are planning to ramp up.

2009 was a big year for IBM Lotus's Sametime suite; a major upgrade, Sametime 8.5 was released, and Sametime Unified Telephony (SUT), which integrates multiple vendors' telephony platforms with Sametime, became publicly available. At this week's Lotusphere 2010, Bruce Morse and Akiba Saeedi of IBM Lotus's Unified Communications division gave a progress report.There are currently 3,500 people in 50 countries on SUT, and Lotus's target is 30,000 by year-end, according to Saeedi. That number may be fairly modest, but given that the first target market for SUT has been small/home offices, it's not too surprising.

The numbers should ramp up faster as enterprises start adopting SUT in significant amounts, and IBM Lotus brought one end user and gave details on two others, all three of whom fit in this category.

Christian Bentzen, CIO of the German engineering firm GEA (Global Engineering Alliance) took the Lotusphere keynote stage to describe the Sametime/SUT rollout that his company has embarked upon. GEA is a $7.5 billion company with 21,000 employee around the world, and Bentzen listed their main challenges as globalization, competition, magin pressure and absorption of potential acquisitions.

It's also a company that spends a lot on communications, and that has already begun migrating to new modes of communications in a significant way. Each month, GEA employees engage in 75,000 IM chats, 5,000 online meetings, and 350 Web conferences. Already, said Bentzen, "we can't survive without presence information."

At the same time, GEA's global scope results in a cost for travel and communications of $10,000 per employee per year, or 2.5% of the firm's revenues. More numbers: 90% of sales are export; travel costs are growing 25% per year; and communications costs are growing 50% a year.

Bentzen described a typical scenario: Dealing with a problem with a plant in China might involve engineers based in Denmark, communicating on their Danish mobile phones, needing to include colleagues in the U.S. and suppliers in New Zealand. With scenarios like these, the company needs to save not only on telecom costs, but on time and travel.

GEA is counting on Sametime and SUT to help deliver these savings. Still, the company is starting small; 100 users in 3 locations are trialing it, and a rollout of 5,000 SUT licenses is slated to begin as soon as Lotusphere ends, with the deployment planned for completion by the end of the year.

Morse and Saeedi described two other large SUT rollouts--the Finnish Defence Forces and PSA Peugot Citroen, the French automaker. The latter plans to start its SUT deployment with a rollout to 10,000 users.

As Akiba explaind to me in an interview before Monday's UC keynote, there's a major Sametime base to go after with the 8.5 and SUT upgrades: Among the base of 140 million total Sametime users, 100 companies have been using Sametime for more than five years, and more than 25 Sametime user companies have between 100,000 and 400,000 users.

2009 being a banner year for getting the major products--8.5 and SUT-released, it follows that "2010 is all about getting customers to consume that new capability." So the new announcements around SUT this week are mainly tweaks around the edges. The one I thought was most intriguing was an integration of SUT with Sprint Mobile that allows users' Sprint phone numbers to be their internal numbers. That gets traffic off of the internal network--Saeedi noted that IBM is using this integration itself--but it runs counter to the trend that many other enterprises are plying: Trying to remove the public cellular phone number as the employee's primary contact number, instead hiding that cellular number behind a single corporate contact number that forwards to the mobile.

Finally, in a morning breakout session on Monday, David Marshak, senior product manager for IBM Lotus, made a refreshingly frank admission that, with the first release of SUT, "we know there are areas we have not yet addressed in the product," but said that Lotus hopes to use these areas as a jumping-off point for not just filling in product holes, but actually going above and beyond.

For example, Marshak noted that users have complained about the fact that the current version of SUT isn't integrated with Notes's address book. So Marshak said IBM Lotus wants not just to fix this shortcoming, but to approach the whole issue of contact integration more holistically, by thinking about ways to federate a user's various contact lists--one audience member piped up with the observation that many people's most relevant contact lists are contained in their mobile phones.

IBM Lotus will also give considerable attention to executive/admin scenarios in future SUT development, Marshak said. SUT should offer different features for who is shown the incoming call (exec, admin, both), and how admins might announce calls to affiliated execs.

Last, but not least, Marshak said that mobile Unified Communications is "our highest priority" to address in future SUT releases. Indeed, that was a gauntlet that Christian Bentzen, the GEA CIO, threw down during the subsequent keynote. He challenged IBM to deliver the same quality and functionality for SUT on mobiles as it does on landlines. "When you get the same functionality on my mobile, then I'll really be happy," he said.SUT starts off small, but some big enterprises are planning to ramp up.