The theme of this morning's Lotusphere opening session was "Collaboration Agenda," and the topics ranged across the Lotus portfolio. There seemed to be less of a clear emphasis on any one element of the Lotus line, but the cloud and mobility seemed to me to be the elements that resonated most.
Among the parade of Lotus users that IBM brought out was Gus Bahamondes of Panasonic, responsible for the largest-ever cloud-based enterprise email deployment (which I blogged about here). Bahamondes appeared in a video in which he said Panasonic chose the hosted Lotus email service because it's the "most integrated solution," and that it provides "flexibility to allow us to increase or decrease the number of seats." He also cited rapid deployment and reduced TCO as important to the decision.
The theme of mobility was struck by Kirk Gutmann of GM, who said the real challenge for IT as GM seeks to re-invent itself is the "overwhelming demand for mobility" among users. He said GM is will use Lotus as the foundation for providing this mobility to its employees.
There was also a flat statement from the stage from Lotus partner John Carini of iEnterprise, a software company that manufactures CRM and mobility solutions: "The smartphone is the business application interface of the future."
Among Lotus product announcements focused on mobility was that Lotus Notes Traveler, its mobile client, will become available for Google's Android mobile OS in the first half of this year. IBM Lotus is also making push email and encrypted email available for the iPhone.
The news on Lotus Live, the cloud service, is that it's acquired 18 million end users since its introduction at Lotusphere a year ago. Users may pay as little as $3 per user per month, according to IBM Lotus.
IBM Lotus also continued its focus on social networking as a component of its collaboration agenda. Lotus is enabling updates of Twitter and Sametime status in Notes, and in 2H10, Lotus Connections will add compliance/auditing and social analytics capabilities in order to make better and safer use of these social networking integrations.
A final personnel note: Bob Picciano, who led Lotus for almost 2 years as its GM, introduced this morning's opening session and then announced that he will be stepping up to the post or GM for all of IBM's software sales, and he brought out his successor, Alistair Rennie, who will move up from the post of VP for Lotus Development and Support, to take over the GM role.
Incidentally, one of Alistair Rennie's first industry addresses post-Lotusphere in his new role will come as a keynoter at VoiceCon Orlando in March.)
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