posted by: Mark Cortner
IBM’s key announcements this week at Lotusphere 2009 surrounded LotusLive, a cloud-based portfolio of collaboration and social networking services. LotusLive is designed to enable customers to extend their investments in premises-based products and connect with a variety of third-party partner services. The new service officially signals IBM’s entry into the software-as-a-service (SaaS) collaboration market and was launched with several partnerships including Skype, LinkedIn, and salesforce.com.
The suite of applications currently included in LotusLive is focused on “click-to-cloud” online meetings, file sharing, file storage, and email. IBM assembled and impressive collection of partnerships as part of the launch; including one of if not the most successful cloud-based services (salesforce.com), a highly-recognized business-oriented professional networking service (LinkedIn), and a well-known Internet-based telephony/video service that enables users to communicate and collaborate (Skype). The future possibility of integration between LotusLive/Skype and Sametime would be very intriguing and could be useful in affirming Skype as a business application.
With respect to unified communications and collaboration, IBM’s Lotus Sametime UC² platform made a splash of announcements at last year’s Lotusphere conference. The focus this year was on sharing data points on Lotus Sametime’s progress over the past year and previewing what new capabilities IBM intends to deliver in 2009. IBM claims that Lotus Sametime achieved 30% customer growth in 2008, with 60% of all licenses purchased with the most extensive set (Lotus Sametime Advanced) of features, and that 33% of its new customers use Microsoft Exchange (versus IBM Lotus Notes).
The focus of the Lotus Sametime roadmap during 2009 will be on integration of the platform with enterprise telephony platforms (Sametime Unified Telephony [SUT]) and the next major release, Sametime 8.5, which will have an emphasis on meetings. The keynote included an impressive (and entertaining) demonstration involving the integration between SUT and a SIP-based videophone from Polycom, and the Blue Man Group. The SUT application is currently in beta and is expected to be commercially available by mid-year while Sametime 8.5 is planned to ship in the second half of 2009.
The long-term roadmap for Lotus Sametime includes an emphasis on multipoint video, web-based audio/video conferencing, mobility, and integration with LotusLive.
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