Powering this vision is a suite of IBM products such as Lotus Notes for email, contacts, and calendaring, Lotus Connections, the social networking environment, Lotus Quickr, the document repository, and Lotus Sametime for unified communications and real time collaboration such as web conferencing and instant messaging.
Cisco's unified communications systems and TelePresence hardware, for instance, which are designed to facilitate easy remote conferencing, may be seen as a cost-cutting measure to replace expensive travel as fuel prices rise.
In theory, government agents who are scattered geographically will be able to log on and meet "face to face" as realistic avatars in a digital conference room equipped with video and audio conferencing, presentation applications, and file sharing, all provided by IBM's unified communications software.