Lotusphere Sunday Buzz: Mos Eisley Cantina
Category
Institutional IT bureaucrats, admin-nerds, marketing buccaneers, Micro-ISV developers and tired corporate drones, happy for a respite; the entire swath of the Lotusphere population could be re-costumed for the Mos Eisley catina. In the last day, I've had discussions with participants from Singapore, France, Germany, Italy, and all over the U.S
The range of concerns is vast and the attitude is upbeat. Some Business Partners are hinting that Monday's Open General Session with Bob Picciano and Alistair Rennie will include surprises beyond the Alfresco and Panasonic announcements.
Random commentary and general rumor-mongering:
LotusLive is a fleet of steamrollers.
Last year's announcement left some puzzling about its strategic importance, outside of the buying 18 million email accounts from OutBlaze. Today, it's being demonstrated as a SaaS platform with many products and different points for customization and integration. With the Panasonic (and other) migrations, LotusLive has made good.
What was boutique is now becoming better recognized.
Lotus Connections, Sametime Unified Telephony, Lotus Quickr are getting noticed by analysts and accepted by customers. Last year, these were seen as respectable products, but they didn't get much media attention.
Symphony is under appreciated.
Lotusphere may nudge some of its capabilities onto a wider stage for a larger audience. Lots here, for developers, that should assuage concerns of its viability to compete with other office suites.
Bob did an amazing job with re-aligning Lotus divisions to improve their customer-facing response.
By restructuring internal communication, the product offerings are being better coordinated for synchronizing their releases and focusing on customer concerns. His departure from Lotus is a promotion. The buzz is that because Lotus is now running on all cylinders, it will benefit more from a GM within Lotus, than one from another software group. Alistair is taking leadership of Lotus, at a time when it is probably at an organizational height it hasn't had since the release of R5.
Business is up, but it's a complex patchwork of different regions and technologies.
Many accounts can't be publicly used for vendor reference, but are rather large success stories (e.g., Bank of India). The traditional Notes/Domino on-premise systems are doing modestly well; in particular, the Pacific rim, South America, and Europe. U.S customers are heavily challenged from a well entrenched Microsoft, but the ND8.5.1 release has returned the collaboration package to wider acceptance. Business Partners that restrict their business to only Domino/Notes have not been the profit leaders. The strongest growth is happening with Lotus Connections, Sametime, Quickr and adding value by doing things like server consolidation. I'm looking to learn more where others are finding growth.
Open-source, open-standards is mainstream.
I'm using Lotus Symphony and Notes on a Ubuntu netbook for Lotusphere. Last year, this would have been novel; today, it's not buying me any drinks. I know I'll be hearing more about Alfresco/Quickr, Ubuntu OCCS, Linux servers, etc. However, with cloud computing and SaaS, there just isn't a demand for a specific desktop configuration. Verde's VDI has already been making a splash in foreign markets, and I know we are going to be hearing more of it. Open-source is driving down overall costs, and extending into a greater choice of hardware platforms than with proprietary systems. I'm getting hints that there will be more open-source announcements tomorrow (e.g., Xen support, etc.). I have my fingers crossed for more cross-platform growth (e.g., Quickr connectors, iPhone, Android, Blackberry/RIM, etc.).
Business workflow for the knowledge-worker is in transition from being centralized around document management, towards process and relationship management.
Collaboration is a nest of IM, e-mail, conferencing, document management, and social media. From a Linked-In widget for Lotus Notes, to a completely SaaS LotusLive solution, collaboration is no longer exclusively organized around generic messaging technology. I think the impact of this trend will be that the revolution of Google Apps will be seen as setting a new baseline for functionality, and corporations will quickly require collaboration that is nuanced to their own business structure.
The hybrid cloud is it.
This conclusion is as surprising as watching gravity work. Running a business completely as a SaaS is not a reasonable option. However, the costs of being purely on-premise is too high. So, the solution is going to be found in the hybrid model.
Calendar integration is being pushed outside the corporation by SaaS
Forget hardwiring different corporate departments that can't do calendar lookups. The answer will be in Doodle, LotusLive, Tungle, or someone else. Because everyone is connected to everyone else with a variety of mail systems (and most business users have several personal mail accounts), collapsing a variety of corporate mail systems into one platform, isn't going to simplify directories or calendaring. Why not? Because a large percentage of all of my work communication goes outside my company.
If you have enough experience, you might remember the beginnings of corporate LAN messaging, before SMTP. Email was only sent to someone else in the same building. That's where we are now, with calendaring and scheduling. iCal brokers, outside the corporate walls, are going to become widely accepted.
Technorati Tags: Lotusphere, Quickr, Linux, iCal, LotusLive
Institutional IT bureaucrats, admin-nerds, marketing buccaneers, Micro-ISV developers and tired corporate drones, happy for a respite; the entire swath of the Lotusphere population could be re-costumed for the Mos Eisley catina. In the last day, I've had discussions with participants from Singapore, France, Germany, Italy, and all over the U.S
The range of concerns is vast and the attitude is upbeat. Some Business Partners are hinting that Monday's Open General Session with Bob Picciano and Alistair Rennie will include surprises beyond the Alfresco and Panasonic announcements.
Random commentary and general rumor-mongering:
LotusLive is a fleet of steamrollers.
Last year's announcement left some puzzling about its strategic importance, outside of the buying 18 million email accounts from OutBlaze. Today, it's being demonstrated as a SaaS platform with many products and different points for customization and integration. With the Panasonic (and other) migrations, LotusLive has made good.
What was boutique is now becoming better recognized.
Lotus Connections, Sametime Unified Telephony, Lotus Quickr are getting noticed by analysts and accepted by customers. Last year, these were seen as respectable products, but they didn't get much media attention.
Symphony is under appreciated.
Lotusphere may nudge some of its capabilities onto a wider stage for a larger audience. Lots here, for developers, that should assuage concerns of its viability to compete with other office suites.
Bob did an amazing job with re-aligning Lotus divisions to improve their customer-facing response.
By restructuring internal communication, the product offerings are being better coordinated for synchronizing their releases and focusing on customer concerns. His departure from Lotus is a promotion. The buzz is that because Lotus is now running on all cylinders, it will benefit more from a GM within Lotus, than one from another software group. Alistair is taking leadership of Lotus, at a time when it is probably at an organizational height it hasn't had since the release of R5.
Business is up, but it's a complex patchwork of different regions and technologies.
Many accounts can't be publicly used for vendor reference, but are rather large success stories (e.g., Bank of India). The traditional Notes/Domino on-premise systems are doing modestly well; in particular, the Pacific rim, South America, and Europe. U.S customers are heavily challenged from a well entrenched Microsoft, but the ND8.5.1 release has returned the collaboration package to wider acceptance. Business Partners that restrict their business to only Domino/Notes have not been the profit leaders. The strongest growth is happening with Lotus Connections, Sametime, Quickr and adding value by doing things like server consolidation. I'm looking to learn more where others are finding growth.
Open-source, open-standards is mainstream.
I'm using Lotus Symphony and Notes on a Ubuntu netbook for Lotusphere. Last year, this would have been novel; today, it's not buying me any drinks. I know I'll be hearing more about Alfresco/Quickr, Ubuntu OCCS, Linux servers, etc. However, with cloud computing and SaaS, there just isn't a demand for a specific desktop configuration. Verde's VDI has already been making a splash in foreign markets, and I know we are going to be hearing more of it. Open-source is driving down overall costs, and extending into a greater choice of hardware platforms than with proprietary systems. I'm getting hints that there will be more open-source announcements tomorrow (e.g., Xen support, etc.). I have my fingers crossed for more cross-platform growth (e.g., Quickr connectors, iPhone, Android, Blackberry/RIM, etc.).
Business workflow for the knowledge-worker is in transition from being centralized around document management, towards process and relationship management.
Collaboration is a nest of IM, e-mail, conferencing, document management, and social media. From a Linked-In widget for Lotus Notes, to a completely SaaS LotusLive solution, collaboration is no longer exclusively organized around generic messaging technology. I think the impact of this trend will be that the revolution of Google Apps will be seen as setting a new baseline for functionality, and corporations will quickly require collaboration that is nuanced to their own business structure.
The hybrid cloud is it.
This conclusion is as surprising as watching gravity work. Running a business completely as a SaaS is not a reasonable option. However, the costs of being purely on-premise is too high. So, the solution is going to be found in the hybrid model.
Calendar integration is being pushed outside the corporation by SaaS
Forget hardwiring different corporate departments that can't do calendar lookups. The answer will be in Doodle, LotusLive, Tungle, or someone else. Because everyone is connected to everyone else with a variety of mail systems (and most business users have several personal mail accounts), collapsing a variety of corporate mail systems into one platform, isn't going to simplify directories or calendaring. Why not? Because a large percentage of all of my work communication goes outside my company.
If you have enough experience, you might remember the beginnings of corporate LAN messaging, before SMTP. Email was only sent to someone else in the same building. That's where we are now, with calendaring and scheduling. iCal brokers, outside the corporate walls, are going to become widely accepted.
Technorati Tags: Lotusphere, Quickr, Linux, iCal, LotusLive
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