In a session titled, “Private or Public? Take Your Social Business to the Cloud with IBM Sametime and IBM Connections”, IBM spoke about *possible* plans to make cloud versions of Sametime and Connections. They emphasized that they were not announcing anything definitive, but you can bet there is some competitive activity behind this non-announcement.
It turns out that if an offering does materialize that Sametime Unified Telephony will also be included. IBM has identified “cores” of software that can be virtualized and provided in the cloud. Possible cores would include:
· The Sametime Community Server
· Connections Server
· Sametime Unified Telephony TAS Server
· Sametime Unified Telephony TAC Server
· A/V Multiway Server (providing Sametime Meetings Server and Conferencing)
· Audio/Video Infrastructure (provides SIP proxy/registrar, SIP Edge Proxy, TURN Server)
Deployment options include 1) On-premises (the traditional deployment), 2) Public shared cloud (multi-tenant environment), 3) Public dedicated or Private cloud (virtual instances in public data centers), or 4) Hybrid (a combination of these previous three to allow for a customized, optimized deployment).
Possible customers would be service providers who would offer these capabilities either as a hosted solution or as a dedicated offering. The most compelling offerings would come from those who are also network service providers who can take advantage of Sametime Unified Telephony’s capabilities.
This ties in neatly with IBM’s initiatives to get mobile carriers to support Sametime Unified Telephony as a call routing engine. The mobile carrier would intercept outbound calls from a person’s mobile device at the MCD and route the call signaling to the Sametime Unified Telephony server to apply call routing, least cost routing, toll by-pass, and other routing logic to the call. In addition, this would provide single number reach for people because inbound calls either to a person’s corporate number or directly to the mobile device would be directed to the Sametime Unified Telephony server as well. In this scenario, a user could also do call redirect to a preferred device.
Although no announcement was made, I suspect that this capability will be forthcoming in 2012 and that it will likely be made available first by mobile carriers. IBM Global Technology Services may also offer it to select customers.
