Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Review of Day 1 of Lotusphere 2010


You probably saw some of this in Twitter or other sites, but here is my take on day !.

The opening session included a background of past lotus videos, ads, speakers, products etc.the last 20 years, hopefully someone inside IBM will publish that video for all of us. It was nice to see where we were and where we got to do today.

The violinist from last year and orchestra did not return, but we did have some excellent drum beaters reminiscent of the R5 era ads. Plus a pair of excellent violinists and a drummer with a great afro.

In his opening, Bob says "our partners will play a huge part" in the growth of IBM this year and so far, it has been a great 2010, for us, and hopefully for you as well.

Then the guest speaker was the one, the only, not sure who we can have to beat him next year, William Shatner. He was everything we always wanted of him and possibly more. Sadly he was not available for autographs or photos to the bloggers or anyone else(aside from probably those back stage).

Shatner said "remakes are great.. but only remind you of how great the original was". How true,
He spoke on ideas, Tekwar, the search for God/Spock an alien who thinks he's god and how collaboration makes the impossible possible and ultimately provides a better finished product.

Then back to Bob and Alistair and how we are Beating the competition.

We have the right tech, people, strategy but we needed a profile and Lotus Knows puts Lotus in front of everyone.

Announced 18,378 new notes since R8 came out.

One quote also was "Sometimes I almost feel sorry for our competition. We can't all be leaders."

The RIM CTO described their mission as "taking your desk to your hip" and it is true today and will only expand over time.

The Zurich COO mentioned fighting old terms, like software in a box, because after all when was last time it was shipped in a box.

There are 380,000 Panasonic cloud users going to LotusLive and NOT because of messaging but because of a broader view of collaboration and efficiency across regions and business lines.
Panasonic didn't come to IBM for mail but for a business idea how to grow their top line.

There also was a beautiful yellow Corvette brought in for the GM speaker. The Corvette is the model HZH which was a special run of yellow with black stinger designed for Hertz, the car rental company.

Much applause for Quickr calendar integrated with personal calendar when that was discussed and demonstrated.

Alfresco has more than 1,000 enterprise customers and all of which can now be integrated with Quickr, another partnership that IBM can leverage.

Notes 851 is twice as fast in the pickup than any other version in Lotus history and no wonder with DAOS, ID Vaulty, iPhone support, Traveler, Xpages and numerous other benefits. It was also the most expensive product yet.

An excellent line, "Customers have changed their Outlook on collaboration and Exchanged it for something better".

Announced another sidebar application, this one from Gist, it streams news and events in your social networks.

LotusLive will be expanding in Spring with 5gb and 1gb file store, options for BES, traveler and full notes client functionality coming soon too.

LotusLive Labs is available today and include slide library, event maps and more. See my next post on my interview around this topic.

Never mind buying new servers, just expand out to LotusLive, you will probably get more for doing so then you can imagine.

Ed expands on LotusLive on his blog.

"These printer people are pretty feisty." -- Alistair Renne to Xerox Partner on stage.

The big announcement was about Project Vulcan which is a vision of evolution for Lotus products.

The key points about it are it is easy to use and deploy, consistent UI across all platforms including mobile devices.

As you can see a busy session and that was just 2.5 hours.

More posts about my interviews with IBM executives coming soon. On to day 2.

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