What I'm Looking For From Lotusphere
Blogger: Craig Roth
Well, I'm packing my bags for sunny (I hope) Orlando to attend Lotusphere. IBM puts on a very good, well organized event so I'm looking forward to going. I also look forward to seeing my teammates, new and old. Everyone from the Collaboration and Content Strategies service will be there. When you work on a distributed team it means a lot when you get the chance to hang out in person.
The team came away from Lotusphere pretty jazzed last year (I wasn't able to go to the main event, but caught up with one of the "Lotusphere Comes to You" events). But during the year the good set of products didn't seem to get the energy we thought they would, at least from our clients. I don't know too much about the email side of things, although Ed Brill says they made some minor gains even though pundits were expecting losses. On the collaboration side, which I follow more closely, I didn't notice any compete strategy against Microsoft SharePoint even though there are parts of the Lotus portfolio that could compete quite well.
My teammates have posted up some summaries of what they are looking for from Lotusphere (see Karen Hobert and Mike Gotta).
I'm just looking for 2 things:
- Does IBM have an aggressive compete strategy against Microsoft SharePoint for Quickr and Connections? I'm sold on the products having some great features and addressing a pain point in organizations. But without a good compete strategy - particularly for non-Lotus shops - I can see success in some measures (adoption into the existing client base, a handful of competitive wins in non-Lotus shops, and absolute dollars/seats), but failure in terms of turning the ship around (getting on the path of consistent, long-term Lotus marketshare growth) and halting the momentum of Microsoft in the collaboration space.
- How is WebSphere Portal adapting to the morphing of the portal market into composite applications? This isn't really a WebSphere conference so I don't expect to get a lot on their portal here, but there are some presentations on it that I expect to see.
I look forward to seeing you there. And make sure to see Karen and Mike's presentation!
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