Smarter Planet is about recognizing the need to see how we are interconnected, how it is instrumented the intelligence contained within.

Bob P - "There is never a better time to be involved with collaboration"

If something meaningful happens it affects people, companies, institutions and man and nature systems.  IBM is driving Smarter Planet thorugh four categories:

• New Intelligence - data exploding and in silos
• Green and Beyond - efficiency
• Smart Work - helping people work smarter together
• Dynamic Infrastructure - responding faster with cheaper and more flexible infrastructure

Investment was needed to let people know what the Lotus brand stands for.  It was iportant to have a top level cmapaign to let people know what Lotus has to offer.  The backdrop of the campaign is LotusKnows.  Some of us were the behind the scenes ideas of what went into the campaign.

Bob gave examples of what the LotusKnows ad showed and what it meant in their marketing thoughts.  Like situation awareness when the LotusKnows campaign talks about knowing about recent news event.  

Me - Does the public get this message however? I saw this in the cab on the tiny screen and while it was a cool ad the message was lost as to what I would get

This campaign is being invested in for multiple years in multiple markets.  

me - It is agreed that the general business partner reaction is high to have marketing surrounding LotusKnows.

You can now obtain and modify LotusKnows marketing for your own needs through Partnerworld.  Drive your message and customized collateral for internal company needs and business partners.  1439 new customers were added in 4th quarter. with 16,859 new customers since Domino 8 was launched.  Lotus Connections is the fastest growing software product in Lotus history.

The solution delivery strategy is cloud/online and on premise/appliance for all of messaging, communication, connecting and integrating.  Whether that is plug-in, mashups or a portal.

LotusLive is the launchpad of the cloud strategy.  it began with web conferencing, into collaboration and now email.  Click-to-cloud is being offered for not only company to company collaboration, but as ways to create support for communities to include file sharing, meetings and activities.  The goal is to be able to integrate services, such as Sametime in the Click-2-Cloud services to maximize value and consumability.

me - It will be difficult to offer provisioning, integration and policy management between the two worlds.

Email is coming back to being the collaboration console.  With the future of email being Lotus Notes.

Bob P - Panasonic is a recent announcement of a full migration from Exchange to Notes.  They are starting with a few thousand users and then moving down the migration path. The largest company has 2 million mailboxes on LotusLive and grow by 20k a day?

The press is loving the movement and showing it off in press articles and covering the movement.

me - but isn't that largest customer actually an ISP that was purchased as part of Outblaze and not a Lotus collaboration customer in general with each person being unique and not as a single organization?

Lotus Foundations is a growing market as a solution.  Xerox is on board, as seen at Lotusphere, in integrating services and layers on top of Foundations.
Current customers moving to Lotus - Bank of NY Mellon, KBC, Continental, PNC, Ineos

The current product pipeline before we move to live demo by Chris Crummey - Sametime 8.5 (coming shortly), Notes 8.5.1 and Quickr 8.5.  In plans is Connections Next with more netowrk building, compliance, deeper integration and LotusLive integration.  Portal 6.1.5 and Mashups 2.0 with more customization, analytics, Connections portlets and end user page creation.

We will see some new paradigms in collaboration at Lotusphere 2010 (we can't ruin any surprises though)  Bob did a great whirlwind job of running through the strategy and handed off to Chris Crummey for live demos.  Copies of the presentation will be available.

Chris starts out by focusing on the Business Card feature.  This is showing across al of the products and shows more than just a name and picture.  it drives self service with title, location, phone (Sametime UC), microblog status and links to all of your Connections information.  The person can go to your items through your card instead of having you interact.  For example knowing you keep files on Connections, clicking your card and going right to your shared files.

Chris jumped into the unified phone book and phone/ip audio connections.  You don't know how the end user wanted to be contacted, the system uses their current preference and makes the connection.  You can then transfer the call to one of your other numbers or another not in the system.

Chris moves on to widgets, sidebars and the coolness of how they can work together before how IBM does customization.  Of course, Ron Sebastian made a cameo in the demos via VOIP and a business card.