Blog

How Lotus fits into the IBM Social Strategy - finally explained


Tags :



The IBM Collaboration Solutions community call was held this morning and a guest speaker was Scott Neuman, Director of Social Business Marketing at IBM.  He ran through a number of high level slides around social strategy and futures.  But I think he made it very clear in the middle.  I will summarize in MY words

Lotus will be folded into coupled solutions with other IBM software products and services to provide these magical social solutions. Gone will be the days of a laundry list of products you have to wade through.

So you will see things like Sametime, Connections and maybe Portal as a vertical solution offering to customers for example.

Learning WAS, Sharepoint or whatever shouldn't matter to the big question.  If there is a software IBM owns then learn it.  Plain and simple.  If there is a bundled solution approach that covers seven products, learn them.

If social is the keyword of the bi-annual to IBM, then we say ok!  Domino was social, Sametime was social, Connections (for 4 years now) was social.  But now we have the term social applied and we can approach it as new.

The mass world doesn't know or doesn't like the Lotus name, but love and trust IBM as recognizable.   This was ten years coming when IBM bought Lotus.  No need to ponder it now.


We didn't sell previous solutions as social, we did it as collaboration. Guess what, collaboration had to be social to work.  We just have a new word.  Move along.


********
This article brought to you by IamLUG - the North American "Lotus" User Group.  Hotel rates expire July 7th!