Polycom, has announced an expansion of its integrated voice and visual communication solutions for customers deploying IBM Unified Communication and Collaboration (UC2) environments with support for Lotus Sametime and Lotus Notes. The combined solution is designed to give users "one-click" access to on-demand voice and video collaboration tools from within Lotus software applications that can enhance teamwork, reduce costs, and help accelerate enterprise decision making among colleagues, customers and business partners.

"People are most effective when the communication and collaboration tools they need are instantly available as part of the everyday workflow," said Joe Sigrist, senior vice president and general manager of video solutions, Polycom. "Polycom's integration with the IBM UC2 environment puts our powerful, productivity enhancing collaboration tools just one-click away within the applications that millions of people use every day to communicate with others. This allows customers to extend the value of their UC investment by adding scalable, standards-based telepresence, video and voice collaboration capabilities that can further enhance efficiency and reduce costs."

The Polycom solution will allow users to "Click-to-Call" and "Click-to-Conference" telepresence, video, voice and unified (combined voice and video) conferencing from presence-enabled contacts within IBM Lotus Sametime and Lotus Notes. In addition, Lotus Sametime Web conferencing users will be able to launch Instant Meetings with voice and video conferences, or include a voice or video conference as part of scheduled web conference.

The Polycom integrated solution will provide organizations with a scalable, redundant, standards-based infrastructure platform for rich-media conferencing within IBM UC2 environments. The solution will feature integration with the latest release of Sametime Release 8.5, IBM Lotus Sametime Server and IBM Lotus Domino Server, and provide seamless call routing between the Lotus applications and Polycom telepresence systems and desktop and conference room video conferencing systems for point-to-point video calls, and the Polycom RMX media conferencing platforms for multi-site voice, video or unified conferences. The standards-based solution allows users to leverage existing investments in visual communication systems.

This announcement expands existing integration that Polycom offers with IBM UC2 and will complement the existing services offering between Polycom and IBM Global Technology Services.

Polycom's integration efforts with IBM support Polycom's Open Collaboration Network strategy, providing an open and interoperable collaboration solution that gives customers greater flexibility and investment protection for their UC environment.

Polycom will deliver integration for IBM Sametime 8.5 in 2010, with the first phase planned for availability in the first half of the year.