IBM announced that acquisition of WebDialogs at Voicecon. The move gives IBM a stronger on-demand offering for web conferencing and collaboration apps (Unyte) while introducing more direct conflict with partner Cisco and their competing Webex offering.
From Network World and Mike Gotta at Burton:
In addition to the head-on battle with the two giants (Microsoft and Cisco), WebDialogs’s partnerships with Skype and Salesforce.com could prove fruitful for IBM, which could exploit them to integrate business tools and real-time communications, according to some observes.
“IBM needed to find someone with a hosted model, with some interesting partnerships, who would be attractive to the down stream market and who has some interesting reseller options and WebDialogs fits,” says Mike Gotta, an analyst with the Burton Group. “If IBM does not capitalize on WebDialogs’s relationships with resellers and partners then this might turn out to be much ado about nothing. If they don’t get any other ecosystem around WebDialogs then it looks like a panic move to do something versus Microsoft and Cisco.”
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