"Peeling back the onion skin..."

... must be a taster of Management Speak 2.0 !

Most of today was indeed around peeling back the onion skin around the strategy of those 5 areas (see Brian's post further down); this time IBM definitely seems to have thought through the next few years thoroughly and the promised suite of products look impressive.

Before getting into the details though, a have-to-mention word about the "decor" of the main conference room. See they have this totally awesome 2-m-in-diameter yellow sphere - not that it could have been any other colour mind you - hanging over the stage, with a couple of projectors projecting these dynamic revolving fractal-like totally cool monochrome shapes and graphics on it. Absolutely mesmerising. So much so it actually managed to keep me quiet for quite a while. That's how cool it is. I want one for christmas.


Other than that, Connections in particular looked appealing, both in terms of functionality & UI, although there seems to be some major overlap between what Connections does and what Bluehouse does. The official IBM line on it is that Connections is focused more on internal company collaboration and Bluehouse on cross-company collaboration. Call it a marketing stunt but it appears that Connections is the fastest growing software in the history of IBM, with 500 new customers every Q.

As far as SaaS is concerned, it seems like IBM have definitely stepped into the space but although BlueHouse is already out there, it feels like it is still early days. In fact this October they are running some POC-type activities on Bluehouse with a number of partners & customers. There was also mention of IBM's new initiative around external hosting of email in multitenant environments. Once again, still early days but a space we will definitely be keeping an eye on.

"Elegant integration" was another theme that was brought up and indeed the suite of products on the table seem to seamlessly blend into each other. Presence is obviously key, but what I thought was "elegant" was how you can Sametime from Connections by clicking on somebody's name, from Sametime hop onto the phone or Lotus Notes and start an email to your favourite person by a single right click, from LN go into QuickR to see what documents your person has posted, from the document onto the Document Management solution etc. Pretty cool stuff. IBM seems to be quite far ahead as far as UC is concerned.

All the sessions today were general ones and very much focused on strategy. Tomorrow we break out into groups and work on the sections in more detail. Should be good.