Showing Your Hand (IBM Impact OGS)

The show opened up with Tangerine Bank from Canada spending some time describing their Worklight roll out of a voice authentication system, among other benefits.

"Raising the bar on what customer experience should be in mobile banking." from their CTO

Nice not to hear from an IBMer first. And that seemed to be the sentiment from many around me.

Start with how people are extending the products, before you get to what's new with products or any other marketing fluff.

We talked about Building Block Approach. We used to say it was the Best of Breed. Time adjusts the verbiage, but the meaning never changes.

This year the show seems more open and forward thinking than last year's.

Robert LeBlanc than came out and demo'd the new IBM Marketplace. http://ibm.com/cloud.

And proceeded to open an account and provision a VM as his demo to show how easy it is. Granted basic server not a full SSL/VPN setup but for those who still do not believe it is as easy as we tell you, well, it is.

Cars2Go from Daimler outlined a direction where cars are more available for you when you need it and where you need it. If Google did autonomous driving cars this could be fun. Especially after a party night at a conference, I mean with friends.

Mobile Quality Assurance experience was shown to help figure out why people do not like your app. Comparison to competitors and other issues.

Everything is analytics, if you are not doing analytics you are can not move forward. having said that, getting the core logic and data with analytics takes time and effort. If you want to WOW your customers, think about yourself and what makes you excited.

And Away We Go!

So what did I learn today/yesterday at Connect? Where are we going? Why are we going there and better yet what does it mean to us all?

It was announced attendance is up 10% this year and it shows, the halls are filled, the exhibition floor is very busy and everyone wants to get stuff done.

Here are some nice tidbits of information, more mobile Sametime 9 is coming with HD video among other niceties. Quickr has an integration methodology to bring your Quickr info, both Domino and J2EE versions, into IBM Connections. Notes and Domino 9 Social Edition is in beta and includes the Notes browser plugin. This little bit of code allows one to use their notes databases from a browser and provide functionality developers have been looking for to interact with other devices and aspects not usually found within a Domino server. And it also lets iNotes users work with their notes links from a browser.

There of course is Kenexa, IBM's recent purchase, the ability to work data to find and create a greater work force. A smarter workforce, a better place to get to as a company. Can we evolve? Time will tell, but we are in the early days of data engagement. Look for the Employee Experience Suite to appear soon from IBM.

I spent 2 hours in the JumpStart on Sametime Unified Telephony listening to Chris Price explain the SUT Configuration tool and how that could speed up installations and proof of concept projects. For my role at VoiceRite this means we can bring SUT to you faster and easier. Want to know more, come down to our pedestal at C45.

I did not get to any other sessions Sunday. Instead part of my afternoon was meetings and then exhibition floor time. One of my meetings was for the Team Social effort here at Connect. Our roles are to help more people understand social and find out the great things going on at the show. Get your picture with an IBM Champion yet and use the #IBMChamp on Twitter? That is part of it, so are The Social Cafe open discussions which run throughout the show.

The other meeting was for the IBM Champions and Redbook Thought Leaders which I am proud to say I am a member of both as are a few of my friends like Femke and Salvador. We met all the new Champions and some older ones. Not easy to get 60 odd people together in one suite but we did it.

This morning at the OGS one of the screens showed this graphic and it always makes me wonder about the 40% we can grow or how to discuss with them why they did not go the IBM route. There is always something to be learned.

Here is the view from the Champion area in the front of the Opening General Session facing all the way back of the room. I caught Joyce in the photo and want to thank her for all her help she does for me and the other IBM Champions. A list of the Champions was on screen and of our photos but I was a bit slow to grab the photo.

Others no doubt will blog the OGS better than I, I encourage you to check planetlotus.org for some of them.

To all those that met me and discussed my blog or comments I have posted in places, I appreciate it immensely. As an IBMer last night said, we come here to listen and hear what everyone has to say, good and bad because that is how we get better. And so it is with my blog. Yes, I may have slowed down a bit in 2012 but I am not done yet. One goal I am trying to reach is my 1,000 post which should happen later this year.

My friends in the yellowverse and you may have seen us sprawled out on the couches and chairs last night, well every night, in the Dolphin rotunda, are what makes it all worthwhile. If you do not know my fellow bloggers, tweeters or Champions, get to know us. We are here to help you and work with you. We may not always agree with the best way to solve a problem but we all are passionate about solving it, so ask away.

The OGS was Interesting

The opening act as you probably heard by now was excellent, I didn't catch their name but very impressive stage show and instruments. Talking Heads man in the big suit type theatrics from Stop Making Sense.

Guest was Kevin Spacey who gave a truly inspiring talk and was well keyed into the 500 students visiting us today.

Group Business Systems and IBM made it possible for 500 local college students to come to Lotusphere today and I am really happy someone did it. The expense and the effort by Group should not be lost on everyone in the Yellow Bubble or at Lotusphere, thank you to them. So stop the students and talk to them, answer questions, do whatever you can because they need to see the past and the future and why it is all important in the context of a social business and world.

Alistair was much better today than yesterday, but still something seemed missing. Maybe it was the oddly worded teleprompter speeches but it did not seem he was comfortable up there, IMHO.

There were not one but 2 customer panels. Why? And the bad scripted Q/A had people reading the teleprompters which was odd to me. Not a very exciting thing to do and why wasn't that part of the CIO events or the Customer Evangelist sessions?

On top of this no mention of numbers, we know the financial ones came out, but were there NO gains? Could the data inside IBM not be correct? Surely we had some good growth somewhere?

Demo's were okay. Northstar is now available in beta as LotusLive Symphony and it is cool, great, fast and from when I played with it, better than Google apps. Your mileage may vary.

The most impressive demo to me was not Vulcan, which was run as an embedded browser in Notes. But the  IBM Software Experience. Go check it out in the showcase floor. The ability to drag and drop followers from Facebook into this suite and just move page items around and all via GUI no IT involved, no special code is truly what every marketer wants. Amazing!

So a mixed morning, but one thing which I and others noticed was a distinct lack of Lotus branding and execs being IBM Collaboration or IBM Social executives. Not saying it means anything, it was just interesting to note.

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.