Upcoming webcast: Driving Social Business from the Cloud with SugarCRM on IBM LotusLive

Upcoming webcast from IBM and SugarCRM:

Driving Social Business from the Cloud with SugarCRM on IBM LotusLive

Date:	Mar 17, 2011
Time:	2:00 PM – 3:00 PM (Eastern Time)
Hosted By:	Allison Marentette (IBM LotusLive Social Business Cloud)
Presented By:	Jan Sysmans (Senior Director Product Marketing, SugarCRM), Brendan Crotty (Program Director, IBM LotusLive Social Business Cloud)

Join IBM and SugarCRM and learn how the SugarCRM integration with LotusLive drives social business and brings you “CRM Made Social”. Get first hand insight on how this integration will benefit your organization and see how you can get started with SugarCRM and LotusLive today. 

Agenda: 

* How LotusLive and SugarCRM enable Social Business in the cloud 
* LotusLive overview and demo 
* SugarCRM integration with LotusLive demo
* Review availability and timelines

All attendees to this webinar will get a special discount to attend Sugarcon, the annual SugarCRM user conference.

Register >

My comments:

1. I had a good chance to meet with SugarCRM Director of Communications, Martin Schneider, at the recent TFM&A show in London and discussed this LotusLive/SugarCRM integration with him.  It is clear that SugarCRM see LotusLive as a significant area of opportunity for them to move into the larger enterprises that IBM specialises in winning.
2. For IBM, Social CRM is going to be an area of significant growth over the next 3 or so years.  Gartner have released a report in the past week, saying that ‘Use of Social CRM for Customer Service Will Grow Rapidly Over the Next Two Years‘.  LotusLive already has links with SalesForce.com (though this is less impressive than the SugarCRM integration), and IBM has also purchased Unica who operate in a similar space.
3. Whilst less impressive in volume terms than the ‘Google Apps Marketplace‘ than Google have for their Google Apps service, IBM is slowly growing an impressive list of ISV solutions that integrate with LotusLive.  Microsoft is growing a similar list too – this is clearly a battleground as the cloud-based collaboration war heats up!