Messaging News - February 2009 - (Page 24)

T he messaging and collaboration year kicks off in January with the annual IBM love fest for Lotus customers. This year was no exception as Lotusphere 2009 was held in Florida January 19-23, and saw IBM coming out swinging for greater mindshare and a revised perception of strength and capability among IT strategists. New Product Announcements There were plenty of announcements at Lotusphere about products and services. On the new product side, IBM LotusLive is the new cloudbased services offering for organizations wanting to exit or minimize internal investments in messaging and collaboration infrastructure. The previously code-named IBM Bluehouse offering was renamed LotusLive Engage, and a set of additional offerings such as LotusLive Notes (hosted Lotus Notes), LotusLive Connections (hosted Lotus Connections), and LotusLive Meetings (hosted Sametime) will be forthcoming during 2009. On the upgrades side, the 8.5 release of Lotus Sametime—IBM’s enterprise presence, instant messaging and online meetings product—was a key update. The upgraded Sametime 8.5 Meeting Client works without requiring Java, making the process of initiating and joining on online meeting simple and transparent. IBM’s hope is that the greater seamlessness of the new Meeting Client will mean that end users can jump in and out of meetings on a much more frequent basis, perhaps even multiple times a day. To date the Meeting Client has been slow and cumbersome, and smaller and more nimble vendors such as Citrix with its GoToMeeting service has stolen the edge on Sametime. IBM is fighting back! Continuing with the upgrades theme, Lotus Connections 2.5 will gain new wiki, file sharing and microblogging capabilities as well as twoway integration with LinkedIn and access from mobile devices. And in a much-needed twist, IBM said that the wiki and file sharing tools for Connections would share common code with Quickr. IBM Comes Out by Michael Sampson In the “hardly mentioned basket” were Lotus Notes and Domino beyond the 8.5 release announced earlier in January 2009, and Lotus Quickr. Maybe this is a sign that IBM sees strategic growth and customer acquisition coming from LotusLive, Sametime and Connections, more than the bellwethers of Notes and Domino. In other words, Notes and Domino continue to be important to the success of IBM, but there are greater customer gains to be made in other areas. Alignment with Larger Strategic Themes Beyond the simple and expected product-related announcements, IBM came out swinging for the fence in relation to key strategic marketplace themes. For geographically distributed organizations, and those that work with a distributed collation of partners, it was the cloud-based service that supports seamless integration with internal systems. Swinging

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Messaging News - February 2009

Messaging News - February 2009 Contents Editor’s Note Short Takes Options Grow for Virtualized Environments Messaging Predictions for 2009 Moving Into the Cloud IBM Comes Out Swinging Next in Messaging News Learning to Do More with Less: An RSA Conference 2009 Preview “On Message” with Ben Gross The Web Has Shifted. Is Your Network Ready? Making the Case Learn More

Messaging News - February 2009

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