IBM has already announced a significant investment in unified communications (UC), a strategy meant to compete with Microsoft, who is fast becoming the industry leader in UC developments.

IBM has now announced it will continue to leverage its interest in Dassault Systèmes’ 3D Live to facilitate online collaboration between globally-based engineering teams. The goal is tomake it easier for engineers to work out complex problems easier over great distances, as well as continuing IBM’s development of a UC strategy that is hinged on the March 28, 2008 launch of Lotus Sametime Advanced, which improves upon Lotus Sametime by adding real-time community collaboration.

Here’s an example of how 3D Live will work:

“Engineers and product designers can tap Sametime’s instant messaging and Web conferencing tools directly from within Dassault’s 3D Live solution to search, communicate and collaborate on product data. The integration of both platforms allows a quality engineer who has a problem with a specific part, for example, to tap a built-in buddy list to directly engage with the design engineer who worked on that part in a chat or Web conference about the part. The integrated Sametime and 3D Live technology automatically displays a buddy list of those engineers responsible for the different parts and dynamically alters it to reflect the geometry as it changes.”