Posts Tagged 'ibm'



Metaverse and KM Summit

There are 2 exciting events this week, which involve my passion and my hobby: Israel’s 6th Annual Knowledge Management Summit (Thu, March 6th, Hilton Tel Aviv) and Serious Games Symposium at Holon Institute of Technology (Wed., March 5th).

The KM Summit will focus this year on the place of knowledge management technologies in business processes and core applications, and how such technologies can be implemented at the business. My 30min on stage will cover the evolution of social software (Facebook, YouTube, MySpace, LinkedIn and others) and how businesses all sizes can implement such collaborative tools within the business – with Lotus Connections. The KM summit is well-known in Israel, and it’s a good opportunity to showcase Lotus solutions in that arena. Registration is still open.

The SGS event is creating a lot of buzz here, and the event will be broadcasted LIVE in Secondlife, so if you’re unable to attend in person, you’ll have a chance to catch up all the action.
I’m gonna speak on the business aspect of virtual worlds, and what’s IBM is doing there. It’s much like the presentation I gave earlier this year at IDC Herzeliya, but more focused on IBM, Academy and Research.

See you in person, or in world… 🙂

Lotusphere Comes To You – March 20th, Israel

Now it’s official – LCTY Israel will be held on Thursday, March 20th, at IBM Forum Israel.

Unlike the SWG Community Day which we had this week, LCTY is all Lotusphere 2008, for those who couldn’t attend the event in person back in January. LCTY is a worldwide initiative, held in dozens of locations across the world, for most of 1H 2008.

LCTY Israel will focus on Collaboration and Social Networking. We’re aware those two terms may have been worn out by various events and conferences, but that is what Lotus excels in – collaboration. And if you followed the announcements from Lotusphere and the follow up analyst coverage and reports, you know that as well. The agenda is still being built, but we are planning for some major Lotus names to visit, Lotushpere veterans.. IBM researchers from Haifa Research Lab will present and demo some of the innovative collaboration projects they’re working on – which might become Lotus solutions one day. Dogear and its parent solution Lotus Connections are based in part on innovations built at our Research dept., which IBMers are using on a daily basis. It’s gonna be interesting…

If you need additional incentive, read Ed’s post from last year’s event.
So, invitations are being made now – but you can ‘save the date’ right now:
LCTY Israel – Thursday, March 20th, IBM Forum Israel.

IM-ing and virtual worlds

What the future holds for virtual worlds? will Second Life continue to reign the scene in 2008 or will other environments be introduced? maybe There.com? or Active Worlds? what business applications will flourish? and what do we want VW to do for us?
Many questions, not as many answers. Roo Reynolds and Ian Hughes have tried to answer these and other questions about virtual worlds in a recent podcast to Voices in Business blog.

One of Bob Sutor’s challenges for virtual worlds in 2008 is to allow instant messaging (IM) between virtual worlds.

Work to allow instant messaging between virtual worlds. I am “Nigel Paravane” in Second Life and I’m happy to provide that information on sutor.com or Facebook, for example, so that messages can be routed to me when I am in or out of that world.

I couldn’t agree more. As virtual worlds take center stage in 2008, the integration to real world will be crucial for survival. The opportunity is in that connections. One of the presentations at Unified Communication session at Lotusphere was given by Konrad Lagarde, Lotus Sametime development manager. Konrad showed some beta features currently being tested, that ‘may or may not be included in the future’.

Lagarde then showed his avatar running to a meeting in a virtual world. Once there, he uses a passcode to take control of the conferencing features in the room before putting up a slide show on a screen. The virtual room also was equipped with softphone voice communications and a whiteboard.

Already Lotus Sametime provides multiple services, other than the basic text chatting: integration with VoIP, integration with video conferencing systems, ability to add plugins (Eclipse based), chat outside the firewall (Sametime Gateway) and much more. Connection to Second Life is underway, and it won’t be long before you’ll be invited to a Sametime meeting, at a virtual place, with avatars representing the participants.

Links:
Bob Sutor: Seven challenges and priorities for virtual worlds in 2008
Networkworld: Lotus toying with Sametime features

Lotusphere 2008 Announcements

There’s been plenty of info on Lotusphere 2008 and I’m not sure where to begin.
First, to consolidate the info, Ed Brill and Alan Lepofsky are doing an excellent work of covering Lotusphere with as much live-blogging as they can, day-by-day. You can also view Flickr for recent Lotusphere 2008 photos, or subscribe to twitter/lotusphere.
So, in the name of order and convergence, some quick announcements.

IBM and SAP announce ‘Atlantic’: Currently planned for inclusion in the first release of project “Atlantic” is support for SAP workflows, reporting and analytics, and the use of roles from within the Lotus Notes client. In addition, tools are planned to be included to provide the ability to extend and adapt these roles and capabilities, as well as leverage additional collaborative and offline capabilities inherent in Lotus Notes and Domino products. The initial release is planned to ship in the fourth quarter of 2008 and will be sold by both companies.

Lotus Foundations: Lotus Foundations is a new family of offerings targeted for the 5 to 500 user market. The Foundations family will deliver a series of servers. First, a Collaboration server that will include the Domino mail and collaboration platform, file management, directory services, firewall, back-up and recovery, and office productivity tools. Lotus Foundations is the first result of IBM’s recent acquisition of Net Integration Technologies.

Lotus Protector: Lotus Protector for Mail Security is a “black box” (hardware/software combo or software-only VMWare image) pre-processor for anti-spam and anti-virus. Protector was developed in conjunction with IBM Internet Security Solutions.

Lotus ‘BlueHouse’ – collaboration tools open to everyone: an integrated suite of collaboration services including Social Contacts, Instant Messaging, Store and Share, Activities and Web conferencing (based on the existing Sametime Unyte technology)delivered as a service. “Bluehouse” expands on IBM’s introduction of Sametime Unyte, a hosted e-meetings service, which is now incorporated into the “Bluehouse” environment. “Bluehouse” is now in beta at bluehouse.lotus.com and will be available in the second half of 2008.

Lotus Notes Traveler: Traveler provides automatic real-time replication of email including attachments, read and unread indicators, calendar, contacts, personal journal and the to do list. The user interface works with the existing email and Personal Information Manager (PIM) applications on mobile devices running the Microsoft Windows Mobile 5 or 6 platform available from a variety of device manufacturers.

Lotus previews Lotus Notes/Domino 8.5: In the area of the Notes client, Notes 8.5 will focus on incremental improvements on top of the best-in-class Notes 8 release. These include calendaring, integration, and usability improvements. We also will ship Notes 8 clients for Apple Macintosh (supported on the “Leopard” OS) and add Ubuntu to the list of supported Linux distributions. Domino Web Access will in 8.5 will also expand to support Safari as a browser, including on the Apple iPhone. From an administrator perspective, Domino 8.5 will simplify Notes Identity management and authentication. We are making ID files optional, as well as offering a way to secure Notes IDs with the ID Vault. We are federating the Domino directory, enabling use of alternative directories. To help address storage costs, Domino 8.5 will introduce a shared attachment data store and other storage reduction features.

More IBM/Lotus collaboration announcements are available online:
Ed Brill
Alan Lepofsky
Planet Lotus
Flickr
Twitter

Lotus sales up 7%; IBM revenue at $98.8B

IBM released its 4Q and full year results for 2007. You can tune in for Mark Loughridge remarks, SVP and CFO, over at Investor Relations website. A podcast is also available (24MB, mp3 format). Analyzing the Software business, we can see an increase across the board: Lotus sales in 4Q were up 7% compared to 2006, whereas the entire Software revenues in that period were up 12%, to $6.3B. IBM revenue in 4Q was $28.9B, up 10% Y/Y.

“IBM had a terrific fourth quarter and full year with record revenue, profit and cash. The broad scope of our global business — led by strong operational performance in Asia, Europe and emerging countries — as well as continued growth in services and software drove these outstanding results. As we begin 2008, IBM is well-positioned as a result of our global business reach, solid recurring revenue and profit streams, and strong financial position. We are on track to achieve our long-term earnings-per-share roadmap objective in 2010.” Samual J. Palmisano, IBM Chairman, President and CEO.

Obviously I can’t comment on my own country or region performance, other than saying we had a good year, both at Lotus and Software, landed some new customers, upgraded others. Our larger geography, EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) was accountable for $10.8B in 4Q (+16%), and was the 2nd largest contributer to IBM’s full year results, with $34.7B (+14%).

You can read the complete press release at the site.

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Mobile & Media Consultant. I help startup companies launch products to the consumer market. Reach out: dvir.reznik [at] gmail.com
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This is my personal blog. The postings here do not represent the thoughts, intentions, plans or strategies of my past employers or of my clients. It is solely my opinion.