IBM Comes Out Swinging

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The 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 cloud-based 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 two-way 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.

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.

Mobile access to collaborative systems is another major theme. We have talked previously in this magazine about how access to email, tasks, calendar and contacts have been well catered to by a plethora of vendors, but that as other collaborative systems are introduced and used for more and more of the daily work, mobile access to those will need to improve. IBM has signaled its understanding of this dynamic, with full access to Lotus Connections coming to the BlackBerry in second quarter of 2009, and access to Lotus Quickr from the BlackBerry coming in the second half of 2009. With many customers seeking iPhone support for Notes and Domino, IBM bit the bullet and announced the licensing of Microsoft’s ActiveSync protocol to support such integration. This means that any end user with a Palm, Windows Mobile, Apple or Nokia device (among others), will be able to connect seamlessly with Lotus Domino without having to buy or install anything special from IBM. That’s a big win for end users, and a new market opportunity for IBM.

A third theme that IBM is just starting to address is the area of coherence between its multiplicities of products. One of the concerns I have in my analysis of the IBM portfolio of products and services is the many different places that a team could start working—in a Notes Teamroom, in a Quickr place, in a Connections Activity, in a Connections Discussion, and more. As the number of different places to start team work increases, the corresponding complexity of the vendor solution increases in the eyes of the end user. With little overlap between these different tools, and the non-existence of a seamless way of switching between different modalities, the IBM offering becomes relegated to the “too-hard” basket. I plan to explore this concern in a future report.

A fourth strategic theme was the presence and promotion of real customers doing real business through IBM’s products and being willing to talk about it. In a world that often lambastes IBM for poor marketing, having known business names such as Coca-Cola, NetJets and HSBC talk about and advocate the use of IBM technologies was significant social proof that IBM’s product line is actually alive and well. Microsoft tries to paint the opposite view—that “Notes is dead”—but with real customers being willing to go on record about the centrality of such offerings to their business operation, one doesn’t get that sense from the empirical data. It will be interesting to see whether Microsoft steps up its customer acquisition and Exchange/SharePoint migration efforts within these specific customers over the next year.

Finally, tighter partnerships that make sense for IBM customers were a key aspect of Lotusphere 2009. This happened at both ends of the spectrum. First, it happened at the traditional heavy-iron end of things, such as the Alloy product announcement that delivers tight integration between SAP Business Suite and IBM Lotus Notes, as well as the enhanced integration between the RIM BlackBerry and IBM’s products. But it also happened at the end user point of the spectrum, such as the integration between Skype for simplified calling, or with LinkedIn for enhanced contact information. And then to top it off, IBM announced SmartMarket, a place to aggregate and classify IBM business partner offerings to streamline discovery by customers. Moves such as these embed IBM within a confluence of partner ecosystems, more closely tying the success of one to the success of the many.

Confusion and Opportunities

Some confusion remains, however. Unlike the announcement of the ActiveSync licensing deal—which appears to have been planned for a while—purchasing Outblaze on the Friday before Lotusphere, and then announcing that the Outblaze technology would form part of the LotusLive cloud service appears as a grasping at straws. Why would such an important part of the cloud services strategy be left to the last moment? Such reactionary moves don’t engender confidence in IBM’s strategic abilities.

A specific response to SharePoint was lacking. While IBM has a plethora of technology capabilities that can address many of the same value points that SharePoint does, it’s not clear whether IBM is intentionally ignoring an integration strategy with SharePoint, in the hope that SharePoint customers will migrate to IBM’s offerings, or that they do not see it as being important. With the market momentum that SharePoint has gained over the past five years, and the ascendancy that Microsoft is gaining in the perception of IT strategists and analysts, surely IBM needs something more in its weapons array that merely a migration request.

Final Thoughts

With the revitalization of Apple over the past seven years, it has become the renowned maestro at staging big events at which products are both announced and released. This raises the bar for all companies. Although there are some major differences between the dynamics of the consumer and end user market that Apple plays in as compared to the dynamics of the enterprise software market that IBM plays in, Lotusphere was heavy on promises and extremely thin on actual deliverables. What could you have immediately while at Lotusphere, apart from a major sleep deficit? Yes, you can have the rebranded LotusLive Meetings and Events services, but everything else was merely an “announcement” or “intention” of things that are coming soon or sometime in 2009. IBM can do better than this, and needs to make much better use of the year until the next Lotusphere, and thus make Lotusphere 2010 more than a place to sling ideas at the wall and see what resonates with the customer base. Perhaps there should be a one month release timeframe for all announcements at Lotusphere—now that would shake up some of the apathy in the market about what IBM can and cannot do.

Messaging News writer Michael Sampson advises organizations on improving the performance of distributed teams. He writes at www.michaelsampson.net and can be reached at michael [at] michaelsampson [dot] net.