A Cooperative Project of VoiceCon and UC Strategies

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Last week, IBM invited analysts and customers to New York’s Hayden Planetarium for a Collaboration Summit, a meeting that Steve Mills, Senior VP for IBM Software Group, and Mike Rhodin, General Manager for Lotus, dubbed “Lotus in the Sphere.” The agenda was part future views, part self-congratulatory and part news announcements.

Two things were emphasized that provide a sense of IBM’s themes for the future. First, they released poll results of CIOs from large enterprises, which asked about their top priorities. The results were: employee-driven integration, global collaborative innovations and aggressive pursuit of simplicity and hosting.

Second, Mike Rhodin commented about three new kinds of collaboration developing simultaneously, and seemingly split on generational boundaries: document-centric, people-centric and community-centric. The last is the province of the millennial generation. Clearly, collaboration, social networking, and Web 2.0 tools will be part of IBM’s vision.

The review of IBM’s progress since January’s Lotusphere focused on the fact that they have now delivered on everything they promised. High-Fives around.

Then, Rhodin presented the new announcements. First, was Lotus Symphony, three software programs to create documents, presentations, and spreadsheets. The programs are similar to what was delivered for Notes 8, but are now available to everyone, for free.

All these products support the Open Document Format, can work with Microsoft Office formats and output PDF. Rhodin compared ODF to TCP/IP, as a standards-based, forward-looking step. While there currently is no support beyond user groups and forums, IBM indicated that this could come later for enterprises. The name Symphony, of course, resurrects the decades-ago DOS-based suite of tools.

In addition to Lotus Symphony, there were other announcements as well. Picking up on a theme from the CIO poll mentioned above, a hosted version of Notes and Domino is now available. Also, a new mobility package for Notes, Traveler, will be coming in 1Q08. Collaboration was highlighted in the Quickr Content Integrator that enables content sharing, and new collaboration capabilities for the WebSphere Portal. Upgrades to Forms were also announced.

While there weren’t many new announcements directly in the UC space, Mike reiterated the announcements made at VoiceCon San Francisco last month—three Sametime versions, the incorporation of Siemens OpenScape functionality to facilitate integration across a variety of PBX environments, and Webdialogs. And, of course, the recycling of the Symphony name parallels the fact that “unified communications” was used a decade ago in a much narrower context of unified messaging. Let’s hope that IBM avoids the stumbles of old naming conventions that have occasionally plagued the UC moniker.

The only disappointment for me was the lack of solid links to the business benefit. Lots of talk about new capabilities and how great those would be, but neither the IBM execs nor the users really addressed how these innovations create/stimulate bottom-line impact. For me, that impact, or establishing the infrastructure to enable that impact in the future, is what matters.

But clearly IBM is positioning its offerings for what it believes will be the future, and these announcements help round out earlier visions. At the Planetarium last week, the stars of collaboration, hosting and Web 2.0 were clearly in the ascendant.

What do you think? Write to me at dvandoren@unicommconsulting.com or post your comments here in the UC eWeekly Forum.

Don Van Doren is Principal of UniComm Consulting, an independent UC consulting firm, and is a co-founder of ucstrategies.com. Don is also president of Vanguard Communications.

Posted in Standards, Applications, Tech Trends, Don Van Doren, Unified Communications |

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