IBM and Cisco have gotten together and announced their intent to deliver a new platform for unified communications and collaboration client development. Based on open technologies such as Eclipse and OSGi, the platform will be designed to accelerate application development by enabling developers to include a wider set of communications and collaboration capabilities in their solutions.

In addition to this, the two companies also announced plans to deliver specific customer offerings including a joint solution based on the new client platform and a set of "plug-ins" that bring together the communications and collaboration capabilities of both IBM and Cisco.

According to Cisco, the core of the unified communications and collaboration (UC2) Client Platform will have an open set of application programming interfaces (APIs) offered by IBM as a subset of Lotus Sametime collaboration capabilities along with communication APIs provided by Cisco for having communications functionality such as voice and video services.

Cisco and IBM will adopt the UC2 Client Platform to develop their own unified communications and collaboration clients. To help ensure the UC2 Client Platform is accessible and rapidly adopted in the industry, IBM plans to offer the platform to developers at no charge with minimal costs for support and redistribution. A certification program is also planned for organizations that license the UC2 Client Platform.