Lotus on track for continued success 23 January, 2008 By Steve Wexler

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So much for hyperbole and statistics. In the real world, or at least Lotusphere 08, Lotus Sametime is celebrating its 10th anniversary with a raft of new partnerships and OEM agreements that could significantly increase its installed base. IBM's platform for what it calls UC2, Sametime offers secure integrated, enterprise instant messaging, VoIP, video chats, and Web conferencing capabilities.

On Tuesday IBM announced partnership agreements with Cisco, Nortel and Carestream Health, and major clients, including Bank of N.Y., Celina Insurance, Colgate Palmolive, HSBC and Prudential UK. Cisco and IBM have integrated their unified communications efforts, including Cisco's plans to sell Lotus Sametime directly and through its UC Advanced Specialized partner channel of more than 1,200 global organizations. Cisco is also developing additional plug-ins that integrated UC capabilities with Lotus Sametime.

In a similar arrangement, Nortel would sell and integrate Sametime as part of its enterprise unified communications solutions. This would deliver advanced Nortel features such as IP telephony, presence, and click-to-conference for customers around the world through Nortel and its authorized channel partners. And Carestream Health, a leading provider of imaging technology to radiology departments, would integrate and sell Sametime software within its radiology solutions.

IBM also announced new additions to the Lotus Sametime Business Partner community, including Ericsson, NEC and Nortel. All of these announcements indicate strong support and a bright future for Lotus, said IBM's Morse.

"Today's announcement reflects a dramatic increase in our ability to deliver unified communications to millions of users worldwide."

Overall, Ovum researchers give IBM full marks for the flood of announcements coming out of this week's event. They said the "blizzard" of new functions and features for the Lotus Notes, Domino, Sametime, Connections, Quickr and WebSphere Portal products indicate "Lotus' time has come." According to analysts Dwight B. Davis and Steve Hodgkinson, the breadth of functionality covered in day one of Lotusphere were quite overwhelming.

"Our initial impression is of an 'anarchy of innovation'. This sounds like a bad thing, but it is not -- and here is why. Innovation is messy, unpredictable, creative and inherently about heterogeneity -- about embracing and leveraging differences. The commercialization of innovation, however, also requires the ability to deploy global infrastructure, to get people working in teams and to integrate systems and information. How to differentiate and integrate simultaneously? This is the rub."

"And it's the nettle that Lotus has grasped," they stated. "Lotus is presenting an ever more flexible and adaptive path forward for enterprise buyers, rather than a 'bet the company' vendor and software standardisation decision. This sounds good in theory, and the test for Lotus will be its ability to actually deploy this vision in practice. If the past year is anything to go by, Rhodin (Mike Rhodin, general manager, IBM Lotus Software) and his team are well on track."