Lotus has taken to The Cloud with LotusLive, an online version of its offerings designed to tap into the burgeoning social networking for business market – and with gaining market share from Microsoft's Exchange clearly in its sights!
Lotus Notes is Lotus parent IBM’s most widely used software, with 145 million licenses. In addition to managing e-mail, the Lotus products handle documents, contact lists, calendars and other functions.By shifting Lotus to the Internet, customers can save on storage and spend less time maintaining the software, said Bob Picciano, Lotus’s general manager. “Everyone’s focused right now on doing more with less,” he said. "With LotusLive, we are brining 20 years of experience in collaboration to The Cloud. We believe our open, integrated platform will dramatically simplify and improve the way businesses interact with their partners and customers. With this offering we're taking Lotus to more people, in more places, than ever before."
LotusLive sees the coming together of a number of Cloud elements. Lotus is buying the e-mail software assets from Hong Kong-based Outblaze, technology that will let LotusLive users access their e-mail from any computer via the Web. LotusLive will also have links with Saleforce.com, Skype and LinkedIn as well as working with Blackberry devices.
So, LotusLive users will be able to search LinkedIn's public professional network and then instantly collaborate with them using LotusLive services, while Salesforce.com customers will be able to extend the customer and opportunity management work handled in the Salesforce.com CRM application with the collaborative capability of LotusLive. "The Cloud Computing model offers customers a low-cost, low-risk way to manage their IT infrastructure," said Polly Sumner, President, Platform, Alliances and Services, Salesforce.com. "Bringing together Salesforce CRM and LotusLive can help customers further leverage Cloud Computing to streamline their communication and collaboration processes."
Additional CRM enhancments include a partnership with iEnterprises, which is integrating its on-demand CRM product, Empower CRM, with LotusLive. The integration enables LotusLive users to access and share their information in or out of the office via the BlackBerry smartphone, Windows Mobile and soon, the Apple iPhone. "This integration takes collaboration to a deeper level, and with built-in wireless CRM, users can work anytime, anywhere," said John Carini, CEO of iEnterprises.
Skype has also announced plans to integrate its voice and video with LotusLive to allow LotusLive customers to conveniently call Skype contacts from within their LotusLive contacts. "Our relationship with IBM demonstrates how serious Skype is about bringing the benefits of ‘anytime, anywhere, any mode’ Internet communications to the enterprise environment,” said Scott Durchslag, Skype’s Chief Operating Officer. "During tough economic times, every business is seeking to cut costs while enhancing competitiveness and we look forward to broader, long-term cooperation between IBM and Skype to help businesses of all sizes around the globe save money, save time, and stay ahead.”
Other partnerships include a deal with Brainshark, a player in the on-demand presentations market which says that the integration of Brainshark Presentations with LotusLive will enable users to communicate with colleagues, customers, partners and suppliers using easily created multimedia presentations with closed-loop tracking within the LotusLive interface. Joe Gustafson, CEO, Brainshark said: "The flexibility of LotusLive makes it easy to integrate our SaaS application with its suite of collaboration services."
A test version of LotusLive, called Bluehouse, attracted 15,000 users last year. "During the open beta I've seen how an open, cloud-based community has the potential to support my organisation's rapid development efficiently and effectively, while remaining centralised and manageable," said Darian Hendricks, president and executive director, Robert R. Taylor Network. "I think there are endless possibilities for building enterprise partnerships with technology that facilitates business relationships around team-based projects."
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