Ribbon Communications and IBM to work together. The two will be working together on brand-new technology designed to improve productivity and collaboration.
The “Real time Connections” client developed by Ribbon integrates seamlessly with IBM Sametime and Connections along with Ribbon’s cloud UC offer, Kandy Business Solutions. Kandy offers all the functions and features you’d expect from a traditional on-premises PBX strategy.
Greg Zweig, the Director of Solutions Marketing at Ribbon Communications, said in a statement, “IBM came to Ribbon a few years ago, and the two started having conversations about what they might be able to accomplish together.”
One of IBM’s biggest challenges was that they had a large install base of traditional Same time and Connections customers in Europe, but those customers were looking for ways to engage with voice and video.
He added,“That’s our Real time Connections client. It pulls presence and I am out of Sametime, thin layers voice and video on the top. We developed this with IBM’s assistance, and you can operate it in parallel with an existing installed base of Sametime clients.”
“Since Ribbon has a lot of different services to offer, including video conferencing, meeting, and contact, I was interested to find out if everything overlays with IBM naturally,” Greg asserts. As per Greg, you can get basically any of Ribbon’s UC services from the Ribbon client, but you might not get everything through the basic Sametime client because IBM wanted to keep a lightweight, standards-based, integration.
All in all, the IBM and Ribbon integration is very unique. On the basis of the fact that Ribbon is also working with IBM GTS (pro-services team) to help ensure that customers can get end to end support.