At Lotusphere, Social Business is the main theme.
That means using business versions of social software (Lotus has a full and growing portfolio) to add a valuable social element to both internal collaboration with your employees and external collaboration with contractors, suppliers, business partners, and – most importantly – customers.
New VP of worldwide Sales for Lotus and IBM Collaboration Solutions, Sandy Carter, considers herself an Evangelist for social business. She noted that IBM is itself a social business and that it wants to take that experience and be a mentor for its customers. IBM saves $50 million for every 1% increase in its retention rate and social business software, successfully implemented, is a significant factor. With high performing firms 57% more likely to use social business tools, Carter says it doesn’t make sense to wait to develop a perfect 5 year plan – just get started.
This is mainly based around LotusLive software, a SaaS collaboration application which is getting significantly updated for function, but the real story is that it’s not a consumer application, but rather a business application, built to enterprise standards. Lotus believes that the key to getting more business organizations to put more applications onto the cloud, particularly public clouds, is to make the secure and reliable, with the kinds of functions and features businesses require.
So, for example, while Lotus can support mobile platforms like Apple’s iPhone and iPad, it also embraces business platforms like the BlackBerry phones and, soon, its tablet, Playbook. In fact, Jim Basille of RIM was there as a speaker (and I wanted to mug him for the Playbook he carried, but he kindly demonstrated it for me and promised that delivery would be soon.
At Lotusphere, LotusLive Symphony was announced as ready for a test ride. This is Lotus’ on-line version of Symphony, its Open Office-based office suite. The shared word processor and spread sheet are up and running and the presentations segment will follow it shortly. This is the first on-line editor that has enough function, I think, to lure more “writers” (as opposed to readers) to try and perhaps use it. In case there’s a function missing in the on-line version of Symphony, it’s compatible with the off-line version (which is free), but it’s intended to be robust enough for most writing (except, I think, heavily formatted documents).
It includes neat features, like an ability to segment a document into sections and assigning writing/editing responsibilities to different members of the team. Other features include real-time co-editing, author presence awareness, a revision history, and contextual community and discussions.
With all the talk of on-line collaboration, the cloud, and the new LotusLive Symphony, one could think that the traditional, on-premises Notes/Domino product might be less important. “Notes is core, core, core,” said Alistair Rennie, GM of Lotus, when I asked him that question. He pointed to enhancements to Notes, comments about its next version (called Notes Next), and an on-line Notes client. The message was, the cloud and LotusLive are great new ideas, but Notes users get to pick and choose what goes where. In fact there is a Collaboration Assessment Tool for potential customers to use and an IBM workshop for customers designed to help them plan a customized roadmap.
IBM believes Social Business is transformative in that it changes both how your employees get their work done in a more interesting and productive way and in how it deepens relationships with customers, all while staying within the corporate need for security, reliability, governance, and compliance.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. More tomorrow about the goodies Lotus is sharing from the research labs!
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