At Lotusphere 2008 this week, IBM’s Lotus group announced new partners to its business community as well as a new set of channel partners.

Communications vendors whose technologies will be integrated with Lotus Sametime include Ericsson, NEC and Nortel. With Ericsson, users will be able to click on a name in Lotus Sametime to make a call and then be given a number of options to manage the call, including VoIP, conference call or office phone.

Enabled through the integration of Ericsson’s MX-ONE and Lotus Sometime, the partnership will also allow users of the Sametime client to see if one of their clients is on the phone.

The NEC partnership gives users access to a contact’s presence information and means users can make a call from within Sametime’s instant messaging, web conferencing or Notes email tools. NEC’s PBX telephony system is being integrated with Sametime to give users this ability.

A partnership between Nortel and IBM is designed to help small-and-medium sized businesses consolidate Nortel’s IP telephony with the IBM System I platform.

Also this week, IBM announced plans to go to market with vendors such as Cisco and Nortel, as well as unveiling new offerings, including Lotus Sametime Advanced and Lotus Sametime Unified Telephony.

Sametime Advanced, due for launch in the first half of 2008, will provide tools to let users share expertise in real time with a web community, while Sametime Unified Telephony will help users manage telephone calls. It is due later this year.