Here’s IBM’s update regarding the LotusLive product-set at this year’s Enterprise2.0 conference:
At this year’s “Evening in the Cloud” session at Enterprise 2.0, IBM will showcase how it is helping businesses stay connected and remain competitive with tools from LotusLive, IBM’s public cloud collaboration services. At last year’s Enterprise 2.0, LotusLive was voted the winner of The Enterprise 2.0 Cloud Computing Technology Buyer’s Choice Award in a side-by-side comparison with Google Apps, EMC and other vendors’ cloud technologies. But oddly enough, the competition this year will fail to emerge.
Since LotusLive was honored last year, a lot has happened.
Last Fall, IBM LotusLive expanded with low-cost cloud email — LotusLive iNotes — for $3 per user, per month. IBM knows that most serious businesses will maintain an intellectual curiosity about the cloud but will not make hasty decisions. There have been too many high profile outages, crashes, security and privacy concerns about consumer services to ignore. A trusted name, IBM provides the assurances of security, privacy and reliability the market requires as well as the traditional and cloud-based technology to allow companies to safely test and move to the cloud.
But, IBM also realizes that businesses will never move everything to the cloud, but will look to vendors who provide a mix of both public and private clouds (a hybrid approach).
Also in the past year, IBM announced the largest enterprise cloud computing deployment to date where Panasonic is adopting IBM’s LotusLive services for Web conferencing, file sharing, instant messaging and project management. The company is also implementing LotusLive Connections for business social networking between employees, partners and suppliers to find and share the right insight when needed. As part of this investment in open IBM technology, Panasonic is migrating employees from Microsoft Exchange or other collaboration software to LotusLive for email, calendaring and contact management.
IBM has also been listening very closely to its customers in order to fully understand the collaborative needs of businesses of all sizes. No matter what, businesses have told IBM that they need all of their collaboration services integrated into one service and one platform. Because of this, IBM has partnered with companies like Ariba, UPS, Salesforce.com, Skype and Silanis in order to integrate essential business services into LotusLive and into the context of the work people do every day.
It’s no wonder the competition isn’t showing up this year at Enterprise 2.0.
Fighting talk indeed!
