Lotus Development Corp is capitalizing on all the new interest in the instant messaging market with a new release of its SameTime real-time collaboration product. SameTime 1.5 adds an instant meeting facility to the instant messaging and shared applications capabilities of the product, Lotus said, enabling documents and applications to be shared. It says the technology can be incorporated into e-business applications such as customer relationship management, supply chain management and e-commerce products to increase productivity and team-building.
IBM Corp’s Lotus division acquired the technology behind SameTime from two companies DataBeam Corp and Ubique Ltd in May 1998. Databeam’s technology was a videoconferencing system competitive with Microsoft Corp’s NetMeeting. Ubique, an Israeli company, was originally acquired by America Online Inc in 1995, and co- developed AOL’s instant messaging technology.
