Lotusphere Comes To You - Cleveland04/24/2008 01:49:48 PMLocation : Cleveland, OH
Looks like about 50 to 60 attendees. Not exactly what I was expecting.
LCTY begins with the keynote, presented by Brian Aylward, Worldwide Portal and Collaboration Sales Leader. He begins with an IBM sponsored study on the issues that CxOs are facing. Since most organizations have cut expenses, they now have to look elsewhere to find growth opportunities and increase the effectiveness of their organizations. Where are they looking that will leverage their far flung workforce? Things that will provide innovation while taking advantage of new styles of collaboration. Styles based on MySpace, LinkedIn, and other on-line communities.Especially since most of their new employees are already familiar with and users of those technologies. As Brian said, "Profit growth will not come from expense control, it will come from organizational effectiveness."
From there, Brian launched into the IBM Lotus product offerings new in 2008.
Lotus Traveler
Lotus Protector
Lotus Foundations
Lotus Mashups
An interesting tidbit was thrown out - IBM's contract with Lenovo will be ending in 2009. More and more IBM employees are opting for Mac notebooks, and IBM is helping them with that move.
Lotus Sametime. This is the 10th anniversary of the release of Sametime. IBM reports that they have 10 million users and of those, fully one-third are Outlook users. Gave two case studies on the successful use and extension of Sametime - The US Navy and Celina Insurance. For the latter, it made them "very successful, more responsive, and drove costs out of the equation to close deals." Sketched out Sametime Entry, Sametime Standard, and Sametime Advanced. Explained "persistent chat" and "instant share." Brian's demo of Sametime didn't go too well, due to technical issues. But he recovered nicely. There was a short discussion concerning Sametime Chat logging.
WebSphere Portal. "We're the best. Gartner, IDC, and the customers all say so." Introducing "Accelerators" to get customers up and running quickly in Portal. More Web 2.0 characteristics: AJAX, Dojo, Mashups, Tagging, Widgets, and more.
Lotus Total Forms. For the smaller customers but will provide an option to migrate to a much more robust IBM offering. Web 2.0 based, zero footprint client, workflow and routing. Brian said that this may not be the final name for this product.
Brian concluded his keynote with:
Lotus Mashups. Composite apps. Good where demand is high but ability lags, simple interface. It will be available "later this year."
Lotus Foundations. Complete infrastructure for organizations that have no significant IT Support. Provides the organization with mail, security, productivity applications, and more.
Bluehouse. An extension of Foundations. Extends Foundations to the internet for collaboration to outside organizations.
Following Brian was David Via, Worldwide Executive Consultant for IBM. David presented on "Collaboration Market Update."
He recommended that you watch the video, "Shift Happens" (Google it). Adoption rates of certain technologies:
E-mail - 12 years
Instant Messaging - 5 years
Social Networking - 2 years
To show that IBM is a leader in the enterprise social networking space, Lotus Connections was announced in January 2007 and they shipped Version 1.0 in June 2007. Version 2.0 will be shipping in 3Q2008.
Technology Adoption Program (TAP). Early adopters to develop, test, and bring to market for clients new applications. Very successful at IBM and to the marketplace.
"Ask a question, get some swag." The first person that asked a question, got a little IBM giveaway (in this case, a metal notebook cleaner).
Search is not discovery. Finding what you are looking for is very important. Tagging results provides more specific results, showing the relevance is very important.
While Brian told us that there are 10 million Sametime users, David corrected him with a 20 million number. Sametime is the leader in enterprise instant messaging. "Quietly building market share," said David. Sametime is beyond the basics of IM, it is a platform.
How does Lotus' Unified Telephony differ from the competing products? It can work with multiple systems in the same environment and does not limit your choices or tell you that there is only one platform. There is no need to "rip and replace" your existing phone systems.
Microsoft Myths in Collaboration. David used the line "If IBM sold sushi, they would call it 'cold dead fish.'" The truth about market share: The years 2006 and 2007 were very interesting. Microsoft had 47% share of e-mail and IBM had 40%. In 2007, Microsoft had 47.3% and IBM, 42.3%. If you read the fine print in Gartner, Ovum, and Ferris research papers, you will see that in many cases they are using numbers that are not auditable, vetted, or confirmed. Gartner, in several different reports, are using different numbers. David wants to know which numbers are the right ones and asks that you inquire of Gartner as well.
A lot of questions from the audience. This topic seems to have brought the audience to life.
Migrations are expensive and TCO is neutral. David said that if you are planning to migrate from one messaging platform to another, to budget $200-300 per mail file. This is just for a mail migration. The cost to move your applications are probably twice the cost of mail but the fact remains that no one has successfully migrated their applications and you end up with two infrastructures to support.
But the cost to upgrade? $50-75 per mail file. Much more cost effective.
David pointed to Ferris Research, which did a great job of measuring TCO on move costs. Vendors have stopped funding TCO studies/reports as the costs are basically prohibitive to moving.
Of 10 migrations, 9 never move. The 10th is done on emotion (I think that Ed talks about this on several occasions).
"Sharepoint is free like a puppy is free." David then told us on the items that are missing in Sharepoint that are included in Quickr. The point of an entry level Sharepoint is to get you to move to MOSS, which is not free. The only choices you have in Sharepoint are to use other MS technologies. Quickr and Lotus realize that there are many choices, and they allow you to leverage your current environment. Case in point: Microsoft limits your options for mobile users. Lotus allows you to use your Blackberry, Symbian, and Palm devices. There are many moving parts in the Sharepoint stack. To deploy an application built using Sharepoint, you require many Microsoft SKU's.
Four companies did an exhaustive look at their messaging platform, while thinking about moving. They were Nationwide Insurance, Coca-Cola, HSBC, and Bank of New York. They provided IBM and Microsoft with use cases. The evaluation was conducted over six months. Not one of those companies moved off of Lotus. But Lotus did find that management weren't aware of the new features and User Interface in Lotus Notes/Domino 8.
"The Truth About Application Development and Extensibility." Notes and Domino provide the organization with "situational applications" using mashups, widgets, and connectivity to other data sources. And they are better than ever. Further, you can use your existing applications without modification. Lotus is providing the wiring to any data source and present it on your desktop. CRM, DBMS, Notes data, all in one screen. He then gave a demonstration of mainframe data getting exposed to the desktop and being able to synch it. "Minimal effort" to accomplish this.
Lotus Notes and Domino 8.5 will refresh all of the Domino templates. Finally.
Comments
Comment posted by Ed Brill04/24/2008 04:59:10 PM
Homepage: http://www.edbrill.com
and while we don't typically advertise staff moves externally, I'm pleased to say that David will be joining my team as of May 1st. Look for more of this good stuff from him in the future. 
Comment posted by Yancy Lent04/24/2008 09:13:49 PM
Homepage: http://www.yancylent.com
Awesome report! What was the crux of the chat logging conversations?
Comment posted by Gregg Eldred04/25/2008 12:39:56 PM
Homepage: http://www.ns-tech.com/blog/geldred.nsf
@Ed: Excellent addition to the team! That was a very good message he communicated.
@Yancy: There were 2 camps: No logging and log the chats. In the end, if Lotus wanted to sell Sametime into financial institutions, the SEC demands that all conversations between financial advisers and their clients be logged. And that is how we got some logging capabilities.
Comment posted by Yancy Lent04/25/2008 02:47:01 PM
Homepage: http://www.yancylent.com
"Sharepoint is free like a puppy is free."
I give software demos constantly and am always trying to come up with lines like this. It's the best I've heard in a long time.
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