MR: Challenges hierarchical systems, business systems could break down private information shared.  dangers regulatory meltdowns on sharing regulated

upside is the transformaitonal power that could be pheonominal. seeing beginnings inside .  global consulting business talent pool.  find and leverage experiece is the competitive : The virtual worlds phenomenon is experimental but interesting.  Innovate, a game on how to do IT training in a game mentality was cool.  Get to certification by playing levels in the gaming, which appeals to the gaming generation. That’ a close system, but with multiuser and immersive experiences it can get somewhere.  Research that Tivoli did around virtual datacenter visualization was very interesting.

I asked what is the most disruptive thing he has seen that he needs to, perhaps through this audience, get you people to pay attention to?

Social Software (I’ll link to someone else’s notes)

IBM Research is a great place for me to go shopping.  Bluehouse’s live charting and Cattail file sharing came out of IBM Research quicker than before.

People are running from Domino and Exchange to Gmail, wdyt?

In September we announced hosted Notes.  Logical thing.  Domino access light is a good first step.  From an SMB standpoint with Foundaiton, consistent UI, opaque if it is hosted or appliance to the user.  More interest from different walks of business around Foundations today, a non-profit in Africa for example.  We see it, recognize it, but we have a long way to go.  Dont have to go on an 18 month lifecycle, doing it Agile with 4 week iterations.  Symphony is on 6 week iterations.  First question it the press conference was how did you get your team to do it so fast, a great start to talking about it.

Rob Novak: dependencies on Active X and others?

We’d love to work those out.

Rich Schwartz: Love the SMB initatives, they look real, but how can you solve the key problem — every month in my mailbox I get flyers from local organizations offering MS and Cisco courses, but never from IBM.  What is going to be done about certification for small to midsize markets?

Not going to pre-announce something, but certification should be very high on my priority list.

In my day job I work for a large company (Colgate) and working on winning over the Microsoft camp.  How are you going to overcome the toolbar for Outlook that you see on every popular SNS?

Started working on it, needs to be done.  When you have a new product like connections, they (YASNS) are trying to figure out if they are friend or foe, but we are working it through.

A Scot asks, Lotusphere always has somebody fameous speaking, what happened this year?

Room laughs.  I thought Bob Costas was fantastic.

Microsoft?

The last thing Microsoft expected us to do is launch Symphony and at such a rapid release rate.  Microsoft is still running around saying they’ve got blogs.  Now they are renaming things.  They can’t compete with what we have got in social software.  In addition to the client and catalog on Mashups is the app dev environment.  30% of Sametime deployments in Exchange shops. 

Traditionally when they attack somebody they don’t expect people to defend and fight back.  It wasn’t expected that we would have this level of investment in the brand.  The development organization is the biggest its been, across 11 countries.

Bruce: Lets talk about the Notes franchise.  Notes client has a lot of value, but how can we expand the out of the box value?

You saw the new templates in the Web 2.0 style.

Alexander Kluge: As a business partner, with Bluehouse, I am interested in what is in it for us.

Only started to show you the beginning of Bluehouse.  Positioned with Foundations for a reason. Extensions to Foundations, taking content and putting it in a marketplace, but we haven’t talked about how it is a loosely coupled environment to allow you to integrate what you are good at into the environment.

Don’t know the business model and margins yet, will run experiments.  What is right for clients, partners and ecosystems is unclear because of a radical shift in the value chain.  All I know is the ad model eventually runs out of gas because there is a fixed amount of advertising in the world.

Warren Elsemore: Foundations seems to be competitive against Small Business Server, its a different bunch of people that who you are used to selling to.

When you open a new front in a battle you ensure your supplie lines and amunition are well stocked and you don’t telegraph your locations.  We see some interesting new channel models that we are doing through acquisitions.  When you acquire companies that are serving SMBs you need to listen them and expand the role that their channel partners play.  Also some non traditional ecosystem lays in surrounding areas.  Playing to win, agressive on cost, reveal TCOs.  Easy to give it away when you charge $400 per copy of Office.

Bright yellow hair: last year was wisdom of crowds, this year it is emergence, how do you see lotus leveraging the social aspect that surrounds you?

Remember when we had Connections up last year and took it down after the conference?  Our business partner community went non-linear, but had some concerns.  24 people from Redmond here.  But we put it back up. Encourage everyone to join the Greenhouse.

Comments

There is a big difference between the social networking software people use to discuss their lives on the Internet, and the products Lotus announced on the first day of its Lotusphere conference. Security has been on the minds of developers as they prepped new Lotus products for debut.

In typical social networking, security flaws can be a nuisance at best. For an industry under federal observation, like health care or finance, regulations determine what can and cannot be exposed. Retention policies for communication have to be in place; no investment firm wants to have to explain to the SEC why a broker was able to give out insider information without leaving an audit trail.

For most people, information is a means to accomplishing their tasks at work, and the audit trails should be someone else’s problem. Lotus wants to solve that, and with their latest disclosures at the Orlando conference they think they have the necessary tools.

Lotus Connections contains all the software a typical social networking user would recognize, but built for businesses instead. Connections users would have the same solutions available – networking, profiles, bookmarking, blogging – but with the add layers of protection provided by the corporate network.

Another new product, Quickr, provides a number of collaboration assets, like content libraries, team blogging, and wikis. Lotus has created Quickr as an open solution; it can be connected in enterprises where Microsoft Office is the reigning king just as it can be with Lotus.

IBM and Lotus invoked the Web 2.0 meme with Quickr, from the dropped ‘e’ in the product’s name to the use of Ajax for dynamic page content, to touting its openness and connectivity to Microsoft Office or Lotus userbases.

They also discussed Websphere Portal Express, a product aimed at the small- to medium-sized markets. With it, a business can set up an intranet site or Internet presence with this out of the box service.

Michael Rhodin, general manager, IBM Lotus, said at the conference that Lotus is thriving in the marketplace. “The business is very healthy,” he said. The Websphere portal and Domino are the company’s biggest products today. That’s no small accomplishment given Microsoft’s dominance on the global desktop.

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IBM’s Lotus Notes/Domino event Lotusphere began this week, and Big Blue has a new date for the festivities. Apple Computer and its users stand to benefit from a new commitment to the OS X platform by IBM, CRN reported.

Microsoft’s Macintosh Business Unit has placed a lot of copies of Microsoft Office for Mac on Apple hardware in environments where Windows-based PCs exist as the rule and not the exception. Although IBM has not officially confirmed the Lotus update for Macs yet, an IBM executive cited in the article said, “stay tuned” for more news from Lotusphere.

That support includes the new Intel-based Mac hardware from Apple, which Apple CEO Steve Jobs debuted at the recently concluded MacWorld Expo in San Francisco. More models from Apple using Intel chipsets should arrive through 2006.

Apple announced in June it would switch from using IBM’s PowerPC architecture to Intel for its processors. Whatever lingering bad feelings were generated at the time appear to be by the wayside now.

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And just in time for Lotusphere 2006 in Orlando, too. How thoughtful of Microsoft.

Just in case anyone forgot the competitive nature of the tech industry, Microsoft’s statement announcing their utilities to help migrate firms using Lotus Notes/Domino arrived in inboxes just a few days ahead of Lotusphere’s opening in Orlando. Microsoft listed those tools in its statement:

Microsoft holds a dominant position in productivity and messaging in big businesses; the efforts being made here to bring in even more companies underscores Microsoft’s desire to widen its revenue stream and possibly nudge a moribund stock price that has been essentially flat for a few years.

Upgrading delays by existing customers presents an ongoing concern for Microsoft, as it aims to launch new versions of Office and Windows in 2006. If current businesses using either Windows or Office choose not to upgrade for a period of time, Microsoft suffers a loss of revenue.

An influx of new corporate users, preferably at the expense of a longtime rival, helps the Microsoft bottom line, and can enhance its perceived value on Wall Street. With that, the company could finally begin moving its stock price upward from its present range. That would make people from Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates on down to its staffers much happier, not to mention investors.

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