Leadership By Numbers

Lotus has definitely beat all odds. At 6,000+ this Lotusphere was a sell out. The product showcase had to be expanded four times. It's been a long time since Lotusphere has generated this amount of electricity, which has been amped up by the continual double-digit growth throughout 2005. It's what Mike Rhodin meant by “code talks.”

The vision of Workplace is being realized, the adoption rate to Domino V7 is the fastest ever, Hannover (Domino 8) is looking impressive, and Sametime 7.5 has just exploded its stodgy heritage. The trade press has picked up the inclusion of emoticons and connectivity to AOL, Yahoo, and Google Talk.

But, Sametime 7.5 is neither an update nor a retrofit. Sametime 7.5 is the second member of Lotus' next generation platform. Sametime 7.5 benefits from all the groundwork done with Workplace Collaboration Services, as well as integration into the collaboration architecture of Domino.

Sametime 7.5 is only an upgrade to existing Domino/Sametime installations (iinstalling right over existing Sametime servers). Yet, it's also brethren to Workplace, and uses the Eclipse platform for application development. Every part of Sametime 7.5 is customizable. The beta will be released in the Spring. I played with it, and talked with the engineers and I was absolutely stunned with its potential. It's as if we have an IM equivalent to the Notes client for collaboration.

It provides spell checking, real icons, type-ahead search, time-stamping, location awareness, photo imaging for contacts, VoIP (with the same codex as Skype). You can even copy and paste from applications directly into Sametime 7.5. It's architecture supports device integration beyond web services. It's not a complete surprise to see Nokia, RIM, Seimens, Nortel, Polycom, Avaya, and Tandberg standing behind Sametime 7.5.

Oh yes, and any protocol to any protocol.

It's going to become the darling of corporate IM.

I spoke with Jamie Hanifin, Collaboration Services Engineer for Mentor Graphics (http://www.mentor.com). Mentor Graphics relies on Microsoft Exchange for messaging, but their CIO had selected Sametime about 18 months ago for its rich IM features. Jamie said that throughout the conference he was continually calling back to his office with more and more Sametime news. I asked him about the use of Eclipse for application development. He couldn't have been happier, “my company is a chip manufacturing firm. All the software engineers and developers use Eclipse.”

IBM Lotus. Truly, “Yellow is the new black.”