Leadership By Numbers

I'll start with three quotes to capture the flavor of this years Lotusphere.

It's time to ask what is the future of Exchange. (Ambuj Goyal, opening session)

IBM/Lotus is staring down the competition, and I think they are on-message.

We are on offense, now (Ed Brill)

Flush with the success of an expanded market share, great technical reviews, strong analyst results and many, many win-backs, Lotus is pushing forward. An interesting example is the availability of Lotus Notes Release 1 through 3 now available on Notes.net. This generosity is not without hidden meaning--go ahead, run an early Notes application on a Domino 7 server. It works ! Talk about backwards compatibility ! I can't think of any database product that offers 15 years of compatibility in the architecture.

And, finally, about the relationship between Workplace, Domino and Websphere.

Lotus' message has changed to be one of integration not migration (a consistent message that I heard and saw in every session.)

There is no one-size-meets-all collaboration solution, and Lotus has ensured that the product lines integrates horizontally. It's going to be very interesting working with the new product releases.