On Message with Ben Gross

Looking Ahead to Lotusphere

January 20th, 2006

Lotusphere is shaping up to be a hotter show than usual this year. Richard Schwartz is setting up a coordinated RSS feed for the 60 bloggers he expects to be at the conference. Ben Poole has a similar list.

IBM will be showing off Project Hannover, its next generation of Domino due out in 2007, as well as Workplace OS 2.6 software, a new version of Sametime, and a client-suite for SAP. The company will also be offering support for Mac OS X, and promising to port code to Apple’s Intel-based hardware.

The emphasis on collaboration rather than email and messaging per se, is significant. Given the near total penetration of the enterprise email market, the only ways for IBM to grow are to either take business away from Exchange (unlikely), or to create new markets for collaboration software (likely, though whether it will be IBM that does it is an open question.)

The Red Herring has an interesting interview with Ken Bisconti, who says “The reason that Microsoft has had so much trouble luring Notes customers away is they’ve never been able to duplicate the collaborative applications in Notes. Email is a communications channel that is decreasing in popularity. The younger generation actually sees email as archaic.”

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