IBM Corp has acquired two companies for its Lotus development Corp subsidiary to add real-time capabilities in the areas of data and document sharing, and video and audio conferencing to its Notes and Domino internet-enabled groupware product families. Lotus will use the technology it has acquired to form the basis of a group of products under the name Sametime. DataBeam Corp is a Lexington, Kentucky-based company that develop and markets real-time conferencing and distance learning servers based on the T.120 whiteboarding standard. DataBeam’s FarSite videoconferencing client forms the basis of Microsoft Corp’s NetMeeting videoconferencing product. The company’s synchronous distance learning technology will be combined with Lotus asynchronous learning capabilities, called LearningSpace. DataBeam also has H.323-based conferencing technology. Ubique, a four year-old company based in Rehovot, Israel brings a patented technology called document-based awareness to Lotus, which enables users to be aware of other users working on documents simultaneously, akin to the buddy list system pioneered by America Online Inc, which is one of the investors from which IBM is purchasing Ubique. Lotus executive VP for strategy Mike Zisman says the Virtual Places server technology will extend the buddy system to the enterprise by integrating it into Domino and the Notes clients, as well as continuing to sell the client software separately. Lotus’ existing relationship with AOL remains intact and AOL’s Instant Messenger product will be linked to Ubique’s, expanding the reach of both. The DataBeam FarSite client will be integrated into the Notes client, while the conferencing and learning servers will be optional with the Domino server. This real-time technology will appear in the 5.0 release of the Notes client and the Domino server, which has just gone into beta and will roll out by the year end.
