(Sometimes PlanetLotus gets in there just a little too quickly! Repost to get the correct quotes included!)
All the way from Australia, this article and associated interview podcast does a good job of explaining the Lotus strategy at a high-level, plus explaining why Lotus is about so much more than Notes:
In this podcast interview, IBM regional executive Jonathan Stern gives an update on the Lotus communication and collaboration products. Lotus sales are on a roll, not just for the re-architected Lotus Notes and Domino 8 but also for enterprise social software offerings and the popular free Lotus Symphony office suite.
Traditionally the last part of January is a focus for IBM Lotus Software group, and it’s no different at all this year with the 16th annual Lotusphere 2009 user conference starting next Sunday in Orlando, Florida.
IBM is due to present its financials for 4th quarter 2008 results in a few days. In light of the gloomy world economic outlook, it will be very interesting to see how they compare with the 2008 third quarter results which showed revenues from software at US $5.2 billion, with Lotus Software increasing 10 percent year-on-year over 2007.
It goes on to say:
Let me start with some background, so that you may understand the Lotus terminology used and get better value from this interview with IBM’s Jonathan Stern, IBM ANZ Executive for Lotus Software.
But these days Lotus Software is about much more than Lotus Notes and Domino. Lotus now offer a number of other increasingly popular collaboration and social software products, including:
* – IBM Lotus Quickr — easily set up browser-based team collaboration software for sharing content and collaborating with your teams, inside or outside your organization.
* – IBM Lotus iNotes — Web-based e-mail software and collaboration applications (quite independent of Lotus Notes and Domino)
* – IBM Lotus Connections — social software for enterprises
* – IBM Lotus Sametime — integrated presence awareness, instant messaging (IM), e-mail, telephony
* – IBM Lotus Sametime Unyte — Web conferencing client and services
* – IBM Lotus Symphony — a free office suite for document, spreadsheet and presentation creation.
The article is on IT Wire, and the podcast is also available.
I think these kinds of articles really are important to the immediate future of Lotus software – getting the word out beyond the faithful to the wider IT world. Hopefully we’ll see more over the next week or so.