Last week, IBM Lotus held its annual Lotusphere conference in Orlando, FL. The conference attendance, dominated by faithful developers and partners, was solid although I suspect the numbers were slightly down from prior years – but given the economic environment, IBM should be pleased.
The time allocated to Lotus’s unified communications and collaboration (UCC) strategy during the keynote session was more limited than in recent years. The UCC content emphasized gains in momentum, delivery of the most recent update to Sametime (8.5), and customer successes with IBM’s telephony integration middleware solution, Sametime Unified Telephony (SUT). The content touched on the importance of driving business value from UC through mobility and video-based applications, and the extension of UC to business applications and processes (i.e., CEBP) - but overall, the content dedicated to UCC was minimal.
In the past, IBM has more openly shared roadmap and release details for the upcoming year – one reason this may have been approached differently this year is that over the past several years, IBM had essentially fallen behind in the UC platform market and pre-announcements were necessary. I believe Lotus has closed much of the gap with its competitors now and as a result, is not under the same market pressure to disclose its future plans to maintain their customer base or have meaningful conversations with new prospects. I hope that IBM will take this opportunity to move more aggressively in the UC(C) than in the past, by exploiting two of the most significant announcements in the keynote: (1) cloud-based service alternatives (i.e., LotusLive) developed in conjunction and partnership with IBM Research (aka LotusLive Labs) and, (2) changing the use paradigm and driving innovation for communications and collaboration activities and events through Project Vulcan, an experience concept reminiscent of Google Wave.
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