It's Cloudy Weather Ahead for Lotus

Event Summary

January 18, 2010 -- At its annual Lotusphere customer and partner conference, IBM unveiled the IBM Collaboration Agenda, a new initiative designed to help clients increase the speed of business and improve results through collaboration technology and industry expertise. The company also announced Project Vulcan, which seeks to reduce personal information overload and improve business agility. In addition, IBM announced the technology and business expansion of its LotusLive cloud collaboration platform.

Analytical Summary

• Current Perspective: Positive on IBM's numerous announcements made at its annual Lotusphere user and partners show, during which the vendor demonstrated a number of upcoming product features and announced a series of company initiatives to ply its vertical market expertise, address current market trends (such as social analytics), and further extend its considerable collaboration portfolio across premises, cloud, appliance and device. However, much of the material announced at Lotusphere focused primarily on product futures, giving IBM rivals a sizable opportunity to position this as a lapse in the vendor's ability to maximize and coordinate its marketing and development endeavors.

• Vendor Importance: Very high to IBM, primarily because the vendor needed generate ongoing momentum behind its cloud-based collaboration offering, LotusLive, in order to stay in step with its primary collaboration rival, Microsoft. Key to this is the formal announcement that IBM would deliver Lotus Notes/Domino as a true multitenant service via LotusLive and its commitment to fully release various APIs and create partner programs designed to make LotusLive a true solution platform capable of supporting a broad partner ecosystem.

• Market Impact: High on the collaboration and conferencing market, because IBM's continuing efforts to expand and mature its Lotus product portfolio, particularly those concerning LotusLive, threaten to fundamentally alter the e-mail and calendaring landscape. IBM is positioning itself to steal back some of the thunder Microsoft grabbed with maturation of its Microsoft Online Services and Azure offerings during 2009, as well as establishing an enterprise-steeped alternative to low-cost, cloud-based collaboration services from Google, Zoho, and others.

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