Social Business strategist, podcaster, blogger, founder of Social Connections and conference speaker
A fascinating article by Bill Higgins, the IBM Distinguished Engineer that lead a major project to revolutionise the company’s approach to product development.
IBM Sametime is a robust communications offering designed to accelerate your social business by driving faster decisions, with more complete information powered by the business experts in your organization. The suite of tools in Sametime helps unlock the value in your underutilized communications systems by integrating them into a more intuitive system. Sametime tools and services can be accessed from within the applications and business processes that you use every day.
Support for Sametime V9.0.1 is extended to September 2021.
Support for the following associated entitlements is also extended to September 2021:
- IBM Sametime Complete
- IBM Sametime Conference
- IBM Sametime Communicate
It has been obvious for a while that the future for the IBM Sametime brand and product set is not overwhelmingly positive.
As I see it, there are several key drivers for this situation:
All that said, I think IBM is making a good decision to very clearly commit to supporting both Domino and Sametime for the next 4.5 years. This gives its customers a decent runway to plan for the future and to consider their options. Many customers have been using both platforms for a decade or more, and shifting away will not be straightforward.
The challenge for IBM is to develop alternative solutions, whether home-brewed (such as Watson Workspace) or in partnership with Cisco or other similar vendors, that are both forward-looking and also of a quality and scale that can support both medium-sized and enterprise customers.
I’ve been impressed with the Connections Pink announcement in terms of plans to build a dynamic new infrastructure based on modern open-source components and services, with a clear migration path from the old developed-at-IBM heavy duty frameworks. If IBM wants to stay active in the UC space and keep those customers, I fear it would need an effort of similar size and cost to replace Sametime (or at least the components and features that are still relevant today).
Worryingly, IBM is now 2-3 years behind the curve in the area of social and video communications platforms and so those new solutions are needed now, not in a year or two’s time…
I was expecting to hear more of their plans announced (or at least intimated) at the recent IBM Connect conference, but as far as I have seen communicated, nothing has been forthcoming beyond a cementing of the relationship with Cisco and maintaining a holding pattern in terms of detailing plans for the future of Sametime’s feature set. (This extended support announcement is at least helpful in giving reassurance that support will not be withdrawn sooner than 2021.)
If you’re an IBM Sametime customer (or partner), I’d love to hear from you… What are your plans for the future? Do you remain loyal to Sametime for the time being? Are you already in the process of migrating to other solutions? Do let me know via a comment or email!
TechCrunch yesterday reported on Slack’s plans to unveil an enterprise version of it’s service. But then it gets a little bit weird… IBM is named as a reference customer for the new solution.
Microsoft announced Teams last week, a direct competitor to Slack, and a new component of Office 365. How does it compare to Slack, and where does this leave Microsoft, IBM and Jive?
Can’t help wondering where they’d be if they’d stuck with ‘Linefeed’ as their product name?!
Typing is great. We love typing. And while there are many fine ways to communicate via typing — messaging in channels, direct messages, and group DMs — today we’re officially adding calls to the mix for everyone.
After months of beta testing, all Slack users everywhere can now use our calls feature. Huzzah!
Little explanation required. 1:1 calls now included at no cost for all Slack users, with group calls included in paid plans. Just like that, Slack reduces the need for both Skype and phone conference services for many teams.
(On a personal note – if Slack would just properly enable local recording of calls within the app then this would be a great solution for podcasters too)
One of the most notable aspects of the rise of Slack as a the business communications tool of the moment has been the success they’ve had encouraging third parties of all sizes to develop innovative apps and custom integrations for the platform.
Just as an example, this is a new one that came to my attention today, combining machine learning with social communications, Obie:
INTRODUCING “FLOWS”
Spoonfeed, don’t firehose. Deliver knowledge and information when your team needs it — not all at once.
Obie delivers content to the platforms you spend your day on. Information conveyed in an existing workspace is relatable, engaging and more effective.
Obie offers a familiar, conversational user-experience you’ll actually enjoy. He can answer questions and send bite-sized knowledge to the team.
Obie is a quick-study — the more you use him, the more he delivers relevant and accurate content.
Certainly looks interesting, doesn’t it. Innovative too. There are new apps live Obie being released daily, and they’re very easy for even non-technical users to deploy and activate.
Whatever one feels about Slack’s features/UX and the impact it has on personal productivity (and there’s certainly a hefty degree of Slacklash being felt right now across both traditional and social media) it is clear that Slack has powered past more established brands and products in terms of developer adoption.
I would love to see the more established vendors in the space take a similarly open approach – start with the APIs and build the product, rather than considering the APIs as an afterthought. Also, treating developers as an open, welcoming and transparent community, versus requiring registration, paid licenses/subscriptions and the like.
Slack turns one year old today. In its short but fascinating history, the startup has managed the remarkable feat of actually getting people excited about enterprise communication software. The company has more than 500,000 daily active users, and it’s adding tens of thousands more every each week.
“That’s our primary metric,” founder and CEO Stewart Butterfield tells Quartz. “If you’re not using Slack every single day, you’re not really using it.”
The chart above shows the peak number of daily active users every week in the last year. Minus the big drop off around the holidays, the company has been quickly gaining steam since August—around the time Wired published a big profile. Slack relies primarily on word-of-mouth marketing, helping keep costs low.
Impressive stats, and I really like the metric that they have chosen to represent their growth. Not ‘registered users’ or ‘organisation domains represented’ but real users that are actually using the platform as it is intended to be used. ((And given Slack is not traditional enterprise software, they’re not indicating licences bundled with renewals for other products either))
I access Slack from my Mac and multiple mobile devices every single day, using it for the team that runs Social Connections, plus multiple other communities. I have to say, no other tool I’ve used in the past year has had such a dramatic impact on my own personal productivity. As I mentioned in my IBMConnectED post, I’m surprised that IBM hasn’t tried to counter the rise of Slack in any direct way.
However, other enterprise vendors have taken this on, and whilst I can see Slack continuing its impressive rise, it will be interesting to see how that chart continues over the next 6-12 months.
