Lotus Live - Online Collaboration Services from IBM

TIF circumvented one of their rules for this conference and invited a vendor to present : IBM's VP for Online Collaboration Services brought LotusLive to the forum, presented of course through a slide deck brought to us by Lotus Symphony, eat your heart out Powerpoint! :D

For the diehard yellow bleeding fans, you'll be pleased to know that they have now revamped LotusLive and made it, surprise surprise, yellow. Like the rest of the Domino suite we have raved on and on about, the UI is Apple-quality slick in (despite?) all its yellow glory, but my co-delegate quickly points out, is yellow really a good, credible colour for an enterprise product ?

Nevertheless, LotusLive has apparently taken the market by storm and they have signed up millions of users within the last year, Panasonic being one of the most notable ones with 90,000 users. Our presenter takes us through the unique selling point of the IBM product, its seamlessness from a user perspective. I won't bore you with the details again, I might start sounding like my own echo ;-)

However, from my perspective, it looked very much like the core of IBM's "cloud" collaboration strategy remained collaboration itself and IBM cloud services was just a wagon they've tagged onto the train, almost like an afterthought, to make sure they look as good as their competitors. My view is that IBM needs to make their "cloud" marketing more substantial. At the moment, nothing in their representation of LotusLive would convince me that it is a better product than their competitors' ... which is a pity, because in reality the IBM product IS better than their competitors' ... but then hasn't marketing always been IBM's weak link ?

PS : Although our IBM presenter promised he would not talk about the competition and would not try to sell anything (as if !), he could not help taking a dig @ ABC about the unkillability of Notes applications and how they were going to be around forever and ever and why therefore it didn't make sense to migrate ;-)