Update: IBM and Forterra Working on "Babel Bridge" for Intelligence

Last week, IBM committed to a $1 billion investment towards unified communications over the next three years. We've already seen an interest from the company in merging virtual worlds technology with the Lotus suite for deeper communications, but the company is now looking to bring Forterra into the mix as well. IBM is combining Forterra's OLIVE platform with Louts Sametime and IBM's Unified Communications and Collaboration platform, or "UC squared," to create a project codenamed Babel Bridge. Conceived of for the Intelligence field, which is already working with Forterra, the project aims to use Sametime and the Lotus Notes calendar schedule and launch virtual meetings, as well as sharing Sametime's location information, document, whiteboard and application sharing to OLIVE.  According to eWEEK, IBM predicts that the technology will be available in 3 to 5 years. UPDATE: Forterra's Chris Badger emailed to add that "all the development for the integrated solution between IBM and Forterra will be released in 2008 over 2 or 3 releases. So this solution is more near term." More info to come.  [via CRN]