Lotusphere 2010 - Busines Development Day

I am at the Swan/Dolphin in Orlando today, and for the rest of the week. Its been awhile. I came here for Mercury World when they launched Business Technology Optimsation (BTO) a few years ago so theres a strong sense of Deja Vu as I wander around. That is not the only reason for Deja Vu. I worked for Lotus years ago (1990-1994), and was a PM in EMEA for Notes Unix and Notes Mac (and cc:Mail and other things long forgotten).

I left Lotus before IBM became the steward of the brand, and I am quite curious to see what the latest positioning is I must admit. Especially since I have in recent times been working fairly intensely on Microsoft Technologies for my clients - firstly in development of collaboration software, secondly in the build out and improvement of a complex data visualisation application portal, and lastly and probably most interestingly, in working with my client to build out a Microsoft competency, platform, and business division responsible for collaboration and managed services based upon Exchange and SharePoiint 2010. (Phew, what a lot of buzzwords, sorry).

Well rested with 8 hours sleep I headed off to the sessions. I have spent a lot of time recently following, observiing, and reporting on what Microoft are doing in the market. I have attended their Office Devleoper Conference, Worldwide Partner Conferences, and SharePoint Conference in the last couple of years so I was looking forward to seeing the difference - as Lotus put it - seeing what "Lotus Knows".

Opening Business Development Keynote

It struck me that the keynote session could have been from when I was at Lotus.

"Lotus Connections and Quickr help turn tacit knowledge into institutional in the org says Lotus" I tweeted.

The reference to Tacit and Implicit knowlege took me right back to my readings of the early academic work by Nonaka on Knowlege Management. Surely, I thought, we are past that kind of thinking in the 2010's. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_knowledge if you want to read more about all that ).

A panelist  said "Customers are looking for value add connection to business outcomes in 2010". This was very reminiscent of Microsoft positioning. Outcomes are fashionable these days. They were at Mercury too in this same room - and they were talking about ROI of QA :-)

Lotus presented a Lotus Business Optimisation Map - Its a circle slide with sliced segments which was very similar to the Microsoft SharePoint 2010 slices slide - Once I get to Pedestal 25 at #LS10 to get the details I will post an analysis - I could not read the detail of the slide from the screens in the room.

In the breakouts Lotus more or less announced support for CMIS, OAuth and OpenId.

In the cloud computing breakout I found the positioning to be much more simplistic than the Microsoft 'Power of Choice' slide that is so partner inclusive and friendly.

LotusLive.com is an Open System of systems according to Pouley - I did not know what that meant? Open how?

Competitive approach

Lotus took pains to explain that the Panasonic case study numbers are genuine because they include Sanyo - This was an open rebuttal to Microsoft, who they accused of unfairly highlighting that Panasonic do not have neough employees for Lotus to claim as users. I honestly found this an astonishing thing to say. I would not personally have given the issue any airtime at all. I was impreseed at the SharePoint 2009 conference last fall Microsoft never mentioned IBM Lotus or Notes at all. Not to criticise it, not to compare anythign with it. All Microsoft did was in support of emphasis of their positioning positivity about their product. That is a useful lesson.

Crisp, clear, punchy positioning

I very much hope this improves over the coming days. I want to be able to make a judgement on these technologies based on their strenght of positioning and their benefits and capabilities. This will help me explain to my clients, and ther customers, the benefits and pitfalls of each collaboration universe.

I havent seen this level of focus yet today.

Microsoft Online Services vs LotusLive

LotusLive partner revenue exmples were all at 8000 user level but Sean Pouley had already said the Market was at 100-1000 so I will re-work this analysis with real-world models using both LotusLive and Microsoft Online costings. Should be fun. I think there are more interesting comparisons between LotusLive/Connections and Microsoft Online and have decided to write a comparison report. email me if you are interested in purchasing this report. 50% off for Lotusphere or SharePoint conference attendees.

Alfresco integration

John Newton talked about Alfresco plug in replacement for Lotus native document management. He intimated that Lotus supported CMIS, but I do not think Lotus have announced such support in public. (I may well be wrong). If so this is fairly interesting and gives a lot of interoperability potential even possibly between SharePoint 2010 and Connections :-) This would be useful for OneDoc, a startup client of mine. He also said that Alfresco was 30x more scalable than SharePoint 2010. Then he gave a demo showing Word 2003 document library functionality integration with Alfresco and claiming no boundaries between Lotus suite and Alfresco at all. I know from experience that this must have been hard to develop, but I think it was an unnecessary software enginerring project as nobody seems to use the Word 2003 document library functionality apart from in product sales demonstrations.

Office integration - IBM Lotus are 18 months away from where Micrsoft are today

There were some demo's of addin information into Microsoft documents from Lotus Notes. They were mostly rudimentary in function and horribly proproetary in terms of actual code to select a range and paste for example. The presenter of the session said that Microsoft is eighteen months ahead of anything that IBM Lotus have in terms of where they are taking Office 2010. The demos they gave were good though. I really liked the nex:// acess to notes via a browser like a file system with locking - that was *VERY* cool and I will find out more about it and write it up.

First Day summary

Lotus is still an imperfect world of advanced technology with flaws. I havent been this close to it for over ten years. I am looking forward to the rest of the week and refining my perception of Lotus positioning - finding out what in fact LotusKnows...

That is about it for today - but here are some other items that didnt warrant a whole paragraph. Tune in tomorrow for more

Other key messages of the day

• Lotus presented how partners were the essential ingredient of their success,
• LotusLive was 'Best Cloud Application 2009' according to CRN
• New 'Collaboration Agenda' launching tomorrow at with Banking, insurance, government and healthcare industry specific teams at IBM
• Increased focus on industry at http://IBM.com/isv/tech/validation/framework
• there's a new version of the lotusknows.com website up today
• support for OAuth and OpenID..
• Increading use of widgets and mashups esp using open social and CMIS standards to expose functionality in REST APIs
• Social Collaboration Roadmap shows rNext releases out beyond 2010 and no Unification between Quickr Domino and J2EE in that timeframe