We had the traditional keynote speech this morning with the Blue Man Group performing the start/finish (and randomly helping with a demo in the middle), and Dan Akroyd as the special guest talking about collaboration as part of a film crew. Lotus announced strong growth (12,236 new customers since launch of Notes 8, and 16 consecutive quarters of revenue growth), so they must be doing something right!
I definitely don't have space here to cover all the technologies, demonstrations and customer testimonials that Lotus went through, so here is a quick review of the bigger announcements:
Lotus have been working with RIM to deliver Connections, Sametime and Domino apps (through X Pages) on Blackberry devices. IBM have also worked on making those apps accessible on other popular mobile devices. Bluehouse has been renamed and expanded and is now called LotusLive (and yes, it includes the email piece that Karoona is so smug about). The SAP integration project (Atlantic) is now a product that will ship in March under the brand name "Alloy". Connections 2.5 is due in Q3 2009 and we are promised it will "continue to make the competition pale in comparison". Sametime Unified Telephony will ship mid 2009.
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4 comments:
So if we had System Center Mobile Device Manager, could we use Connections to deliver further functionality on top to Windows Mobile devices? Or is it part of the management of those devices and would be instead of SCMDM?
How were Blue Man group?
Interwebs are now pushing out more details too - http://www.neowin.net/news/main/09/01/20/ibm-lotus-introduces-portfolio-of-integrated-cloud-services
Blue Man Group were really good - they 'Lotusified' it a bit by having one of the guys 'bleed yellow' during the performance ;-)
Dan Akroyd wasn't as inspiring a speaker as Chris Gardner, so beyond the novelty of having a famous actor on the stage I don't think that worked so well
The System Center question is a good one and the answer hinges on the different philosophies of IBM and Microsoft. None of the Lotus products are about managing the device (that's IBM's Tivoli product range).
My take is this: In the Lotus camp the thinking is that we're getting to the point where even managed devices can't be trusted and as Lotus want to support many platforms, the direction is to build strong security into OS agnostic applications.
On the other hand Microsoft has the device central to their collaboration strategy, with the idea being that you can build stronger integration if you tie into the OS more tightly.
Both are valid philosophies and each have their pros and cons. For me thinking about our strategic direction, it's a question of choosing which philosophy to embrace rather than which companies products is currently shinier!
I disagree - the shininess of the product is the key defining issue to be evaluated.
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