While millions of people around the country were cheering and applauding for the inaguration our new president this week, a smaller crowd gathered in Orlando to cheer and applaud for their favorite technology provider at Lotusphere 2009. Lotusphere is a love-fest between IBM Lotus and its faithful, loyal customers. Despite the economy, this year’s attendance set a record with 2% growth over last year.
The theme was Resonance, based on the resonance IBM is receiving from its customer base and channel partners that are being impacted by IBM’s Lotus software solutions. We heard about IBM’s Smart Planet initiative, which includes building a smarter workforce by helping people collaborate better. Building on the “smart” theme, one of the highlights of the conference was during the Unified Communications keynote when Bruce Morse pretended to answer a call with his shoe phone, a la Maxwell Smart of “Get Smart.” Those of us who remember the original TV show had a great laugh.
As part of the smart planet theme, IBM announced LotusLive – a cloud-based service to help build communities and enable people to work more effectively beyond their own company for “extranet collaboration.” Building on its Bluehouse social networking and collaboration service that was announced last year, the renamed LotusLive includes additional services such as online collaboration, social networking, and messaging solutions for business. LotusLive is targeted at companies of all sizes, including enterprises, SMB customers, and telcos – although IBM acknowledges that it’s really too early to tell which types of companies will be the key adopters. The service will be hosted by IBM, rather than carriers or service providers, and pricing is not yet available. Several services will be delivered by LotusLive, including collaboration, meetings, and email services. LotusLive Meetings is currently available under its previous name, Sametime Unyte. The email service, LotusLive, Notes is a hosted version of Lotus Notes. Other services include LotusLive Connections, LotusLive Events, and LotusLive iNotes. The collaboration service, LotusLive Engage, is an integrated suite of Web collaboration and business networking solutions that lets users store and share files, host web meetings, create surveys, and connect with others to share information. LotusLive Engage is currently in open beta and is expected to be released in the first quarter of 2009.
On the Unified Communications front, Akiba Saeedi and Bruce Morse stated during the UC keynote that users don’t have to rip and replace their telephony systems when moving to UC, and that “IBM has a smarter philosophy,” which is to integrate with what you already have. They noted that during the 12-month period ending Q3 2008, IBM added over 30% new Sametime customers, including Microsoft Exchange and Outlook shops, which make up one-third of Sametime customers. Sametime is being used in a variety of verticals and locations - even in submarines!
IBM unveiled the next major release of Sametime – 8.5 - featuring a new integrated meeting experience. It provides web, audio, and video conferencing with the ability to get into meetings from a variety of entry points at what IBM says is “lightning speed,” using drag and drop capabilities to bring people into a meeting. Another feature is persistent meeting rooms, or virtual war rooms with content, transcripts, etc. Collaboration services can be launched from the user’s applications and business processes, or from the Sametime client. Other features of the new release include improved video, and a new Web 2.0 browser interface. One new feature that got the audience excited was mobile support for the iPhone, which extends Sametime functionality to the iPhone.
I’d say that all in all, most of the announcements were incremental or evolutionary in nature. While there was nothing that knocked my socks off, there were lots of new features and capabilities announced for Sametime, as well as Lotus Notes and IBM’s social software products Quickr and Connections. LotusLive is also an evolution of IBM’s Bluehouse and Sametime Unyte services. While it’s important for IBM to enhance and improve its unified communications and collaboration products and services, as well as its social software offerings, I would have liked to have been able to return home as excited and pumped as I was last year when I first heard about Bluehouse and Connections. I expect that IBM is holding off some big announcements until VoiceCon, so I’ll just have to be patient.