Posts Tagged ‘lotuslive’
Cloud Expansion In Japan
Ah, it’s a happy day for me. Why, you ask?? Golf, of course!
The Open Championship kicked off at Royal St. George’s in Scotland, another of golf’s major tournaments.
In fact, it’s gonna be a very busy weekend, what with our rockin’ U.S. Women’s soccer team having taken out France in the semi-finals of the FIFA Women’s World Cup yesterday evening.
Nice match again, ladies. And good luck against Japan on Sunday!
On the topic of Japan, today in Tokyo IBM announced a broad expansion of its cloud computing services for customers there and in the Asia Pacific region.
The new IBM Cloud Data Center, along with a data center for LotusLive, IBM’s cloud collaboration service, will extend IBM’s cloud delivery network of cloud computing centers that serve in over 50 countries around the world.
To date, IBM has centers based in Singapore, Germany, Canada, and the United States; and 13 global cloud labs, of which seven are based in Asia Pacific – China, India, Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, Vietnam and Singapore.
The new IBM Cloud Data Center located in Makuhari, Japan delivers IBM’s SmartCloud enterprise-class services which include a broad spectrum of secure managed services, to run diverse workloads across multiple delivery methods both public and private.
LotusLive Expansion
In addition, IBM announced it will open a dedicated data center for LotusLive, IBM’s cloud-based collaboration services, in Japan. The data center, which will be available later this year, is designed to allow customers in Japan to more easily move to the cloud.
LotusLive offers integrated social collaboration tools that combine a company’s business social network with capabilities such as file storing and sharing, instant messaging, Web conferencing and activity management.
This secure integration allows users to share and edit information, host online meetings and manage activities easily inside and outside company boundaries.
The Japan data center is designed to help improve network performance and increase business opportunities for LotusLive users. The center will allow clients, who cannot take their data outside the country due to security and regulatory compliance, to work in a security-rich cloud environment.
You can learn more via the IBM Japan cloud computing site (Warning: It’s in Japanese!)
Go here for an English language site on IBM’s SmartCloud initiative.
New Collaboration Capabilities
IBM introduced a new collaboration software suite in the that gives users one-click access to collaboration and social networking services for only $10 per month via the cloud.
IBM also announced today new enterprise-class email and social networking capabilities, value pricing options and third party integrations for its flagship cloud collaboration offering, LotusLive.
The Communities feature in LotusLive enables users to tag information, share bookmarks, create activities and use a discussion forum from the IBM cloud.
As I’ve mentioned in this blog previously, LotusLive is how many of us inside IBM currently manage and communicate across great distances, farflung teams, and so on, and has, in fact, just as with the original instantiation of our enterprise instant messaging system, Lotus Sametime, become integral to how we run our business.
What’s New: LotusLive, Lotus Notes, Are In The Cloud
With this announcement, IBM is making it easier for customers of all sizes to take advantage of all the collaboration capabilities of LotusLive. The new LotusLive collaboration suite combines enterprise-class email, calendaring, instant messaging, Web conferencing, file sharing and social networking services in an easy to deploy, simplified package for $10 per user per month.
IBM also unveiled a Cloud service called LotusLive Notes, based on IBM’s flagship messaging capabilities already used by millions of people worldwide. Building on deep experience in serving the enterprise, LotusLive Notes delivers feature-rich email, shared calendar, instant messaging and personal contact services, starting at only $5 per user, per month.
I can hear the Crazy Eddie voiceover: “Only $5 per user, per month! Are you craaazyyy?!”
Building Community With Communities
Building on its leadership in enterprise social networking, IBM is also introducing a feature within LotusLive called “Communities” to help advance organizations’ ability to work together both inside and outside their enterprise.
Within a Community, members have the ability to tag information, share files and bookmarks, track projects and host discussion forums securely across multiple companies.
“Businesses are looking to reduce costs, do more with less, and find ways to work more closely with their customers and partners,” said Sean Poulley, IBM vice president of cloud collaboration. “LotusLive gives them the right tools to do this, delivered by a company they trust and is focused on security and reliability.”
Businesses Big And Small: Choosing LotusLive for Competitive Advantage
Businesses around the world, such as aatranslations, SIT La Precisa and Signature Mortgage, are choosing LotusLive cloud collaboration services for the unique business value it delivers in today’s competitive landscape.
aatranslations, a mid-size pan European provider of language translation services, is taking advantage of the LotusLive licensing model to easily collaborate with 7,000 clients and 700 translators in 20 countries, without the worry of firewalls or additional costs.
Working with IBM third-party provider FreshTL, aatranslations chose IBM LotusLive over Microsoft BPOS and Google Apps because LotusLive removes barriers to working together, allowing them to conduct business and collaborate with anyone and reducing the time it takes to work on every project.
SIT La Precisa, an Italian-based company that specializes in the design and manufacturing of electronic controls and equipment uses Lotus Notes and Domino on premise in their headquarters. They chose IBM LotusLive because of the unique hybrid value, bringing together on-premise and cloud-based services easily.
With employees working all over the world, many in small offices with just a few people, it had been difficult to provide the same email service to everyone. SIT La Precisa wanted to move its disparate staff off a variety of email systems, including Microsoft Exchange, onto one email platform without having to make expensive capital investments in infrastructure. It is currently rolling out LotusLive iNotes in several markets across the globe to provide employees with essential messaging and calendaring capabilities under one domain name.
Signature Mortgage Corporation of Canton, Ohio is using IBM LotusLive and taking advantage of the integration with third-party Silanis’ e-SignLive services, delivered by IBM business partner Silanis. By allowing their clients to electronically review and sign mortgage applications from the convenience of their home or office, Signature Mortgage hopes to improve customer experiences, generate better rates for customers and increase revenues for the company.
By filing and sharing their documents in LotusLive, customers no longer need to spend time or money on printing, shipping, returning and verifying applications. Signature Mortgage expects to reduce the time to process mortgage applications from its current seven-day track record down to 24 hours.
Today IBM also announced two new integrations with third-party providers, Tungle and Bricsys, designed to allow customers to collaborate seamlessly in their day-to-day work. These latest integrations illustrate IBM’s commitment to help mid-size businesses find new and affordable ways to apply technology to solve problems and scale for future growth.
Tungle Corp. has teamed with IBM to integrate its online scheduling and calendar services with LotusLive, and Bricsys, a provider of cloud-based document, data, task and report sharing, has teamed with IBM to integrate its Vondle services with LotusLive.
For more information on IBM LotusLive cloud collaboration services, please visit www.lotuslive.com
E-Harmony For Business
IBM and Ariba have signed an agreement designed to help fuel better commerce by matching B2B buyers and sellers of goods and services in the cloud using state-of-the-art collaboration and social networking technologies.
Think E-Harmony for business.
With this deal, Ariba plans to integrate its cloud solution, the Ariba Commerce Cloud, with IBM LotusLive to help buyers and sellers communicate and share information more fluidly and effectively.
Face-to-face meetings, phone calls, faxes, documents and spreadsheets are being leapfrogged by more advanced, efficient methods of collaboration and communication such as Web conferencing, instant messaging, social networking and file sharing, among other things.
To help companies take advantage of these advances, Ariba’s integration with LotusLive will provide a web-based service that helps buyers and sellers find each other quickly and efficiently for new business opportunities by automatically matching buyers’ business requirements to seller capabilities.
Integrating LotusLive communication and collaboration into the buyer-seller discovery process will provide buyers and sellers the tools to interact, answer questions and exchange accurate information prior to entering the formal RFI/P or contracting phase.
“Finding the right trading partners is hard. Collaborating with them to do business better is even harder,” said Bhaskar Himatsingka, Chief Technology Officer, Ariba, Inc. “Our integration plans with IBM LotusLive are designed to help make it easier for buyers and sellers to collaborate in new ways by taking advantage of IBM’s powerful set of web-based tools for real-time collaboration within Ariba’s sourcing and sales process solutions.”
“Like people searching for someone special, businesses are looking for a high degree of compatibility with their prospective partners," said Sean Poulley, IBM VP of cloud collaboration.
“The successful combination of LotusLive and the Ariba Commerce Cloud will provide such a matchmaking comfort zone in which networks of partners, suppliers and customers can easily work together across company boundaries to help do their jobs more efficiently and cost-effectively, and perhaps even develop lasting relationships."
Click here to learn more about the IBM LotusLive online collaboration portfolio.
How Now Brown Cloud
Yesterday, IBM announced some additions and enhancements to its LotusLive cloud collaboration tools family, including the ability to access UPS shipping functions from within the product.
LotusLive delivers cloud-based, integrated email, Web conferencing, social networking and collaboration services to simplify and improve daily business interactions with customers, partners and colleagues.
Though you won’t get that cool looking guy from the UPS TV commercials – you know, the one where he makes it all seem so simple while drawing at the whiteboard – what you will get is the ability to get quick access to UPS shipping details directly from your LotusLive dashboard.
UPS serves more than 200 countries and territories worldwide; this solution places the ubiquitous UPS shipping services at the fingertips of LotusLive business users.
IBM also announced additional language support (15 languages, including the addition of Danish, Finnish, Norwegian and Swedish, and adding to the current availability of Brazilian Portuguese, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Simplified Chinese, Spanish and Traditional Chinese) and other new integrated services from Skype, Salesforce.com, and Silanis.
Skype, E-Signature Services, $7 A Month Per User
With the LotusLive Engage for Salesforce CRM integration, customers can take advantage of LotusLive Meetings, Files, and Activities to collaborate with colleagues around the world from within Salesforce CRM.
Silanis e-SignLive e-signature services enables people from multiple organizations to use LotusLive to easily participate in a fully electronic signing process, helping to complete business transactions and legal contracts faster, more efficiently and with fewer errors.
This partnership will expand the potential reach of LotusLive to the world’s largest insurance and financial services companies, government agencies, integrators and service providers that trust Silanis to move their business processes online.
As an example, Signature Mortgage Corporation, a beta customer for Silanis e-SignLive, is enabling clients to complete and sign mortgage applications using the combined Silanis e-SignLive and LotusLive solution. This will help to improve customer experience and retention at Signature Mortgage Corporation, as well as enable the 10-person mortgage consulting team out of Canton, Ohio to compete in a market where low rates alone aren’t enough to win new business.
LotusLive users can now also use Skype to make voice calls via a simple click of a LotusLive contact’s Skype name or phone number. Millions of individuals and businesses use Skype to make free voice calls, send instant messages and share files with other Skype users — and now, LotusLive users can have convenient access to these same global communications tools right from within LotusLive.
These partner integrations from LotusLive help people work the way they want to work, demonstrate the power of the open Web and showcase the power of the cloud – allowing people from any company to easily come together to get business done. For more information on these integrations, please visit here.
Available now, businesses can purchase a new bundle of secure, enterprise-grade cloud email and social networking for only $7 USD per user, per month.
Combining the capabilities of LotusLive iNotes and LotusLive Connections, the bundle provides essential email, file store and share, activity management, instant messaging and social networking services to enable businesses to work with anyone from anywhere and is available today at www.lotuslive.com/bundle.
A no-cost, 30-day trial in these languages is available at www.lotuslive.com/compare. To see these new capabilities in action, you can watch the demo below.
For information on the IBM LotusLive Partner Program — including a no-cost, 365-day demo account for IBM business partners – visit www.lotuslive.com/businesspartners.
Netbooks In Africa
How about a netbook for $190 U.S.?
Today, Canonical and IBM announced a partnership with Simmtronics to offer the Simmtronics netbook, the Simmbook, to emerging markets at just that price.
Starting in South Africa, the Simmbook is preloaded with IBM Client for Smart Work, which includes IBM Lotus Symphony (productivity suite), access to IBM LotusLive cloud collaboration services, and the choice to add other IBM Lotus collaboration software like Lotus Notes and Lotus Sametime.
This move helps bridge the gap between low price and high performance, providing a desirable form factor (the netbook) with an affordable software and OS footprint, one that provides a better computing option for those in small-medium businesses, non-profits, and even academia which might not otherwise be able to afford these types of collaboration resources.
“As Africa makes economic strides during a time when new technologies like cloud computing are emerging, the Simmbook netbook with LotusLive, Lotus Symphony, Lotus Notes and Ubuntu Linux provides businesses with a complete solution at an affordable price,” said Clifford Foster, IBM sub-Saharan CTO.
“CIO’s, IT directors and IT architects from all type of organizations in South Africa — even those that typically cannot afford new, expensive personal computers — can now legitimately consider netbooks instead of PCs for business use.”
Designed specifically for mobile computing, the Simmbook provides the power of a full-sized laptop in a compact body. IBM Client for Smart Work is IBM and Canonical’s complete desktop package that’s open, easy to use, and offers a security-rich alternative to costly, proprietary PC software, such as Microsoft Windows. It can help lower costs by up to 50 percent of a typical Microsoft PC.
Simmtronics is working closely with IBM to provide low cost computing in emerging markets around the world. In addition to African countries, the low-cost Simmbook will also be available in India, Thailand and Vietnam.
The new Simmbook preloaded with IBM Client for Smart Work can be purchased online directly from Simmtronics using this order form http://www.simmtronics.com/order_form.php. Simmtronics and IBM plan to continue to work with clients to offer the Simmbook at a competitive price to other countries around the world.
Lotusphere 2010: Day 1 Announcements
At the press conference this morning here in Orlando, IBM made a number of key announcements relative to the collaboration space.
A couple were mentioned in my prior post, but let me quickly break down all of them now that they’ve been made public:
- Acceleration of Cloud Computing with LotusLive
- Collaboration Agenda Announcement
- Project Vulcan (Blueprint for the future of collaboration)
- IBM and RIM Enterprise Collaboration and Social Networking
- Availability of IBM Client for Smart Work in India (via Business Partners)
I already addressed a couple of these via Mr. Picciano’s keynote, so now it’s time for a little depth on the others.
The LotusLive announcement involves both the technology and business expansion of the LotusLive cloud collaboration pipeline through a new R&D pipeline from IBM Research.
IBM also plans to open the LotusLive suite to new partners, and the services will provide integrated email, Web conferencing, social networking, and collaboration with IBM’s focus on security, reliability and enterprise integration.
A number of the fruits from this new R&D effort will be unveiled this week, including the following:
- Slide Library, a collaborative way to build and share presentations (I can hear a collective ‘Amen’ across IBM marketing on this one)
- Collaborative Recorded Meetings, a service that records and instantly transcribes meeting presentations and audio/video for searching and tagging
- Event Maps, an interactive way to visualize and interact with conference schedules
- Composer, the ability to create LotusLive Mashups through the combination of LotusLive services.
Also expected in 2Q10, Project Concord, a new Web-based document editor for creating and sharing documents, presentations and spreadsheets.
On the LotusLive Notes version upgrade, IBM will provide email, calendar, contact management, and IM capabilities to customers in a multi-tenant environment.
New services and options here will result in a reduction in the minimum number of users for a LotusLive Notes subscription from 1,000 to 25, IBM Lotus Sametime IM support, and a 5G standard mailbox quota.
IBM is now accepting requests to participate in the LotusLive Notes managed beta program here.
Talk Show For Sale, Cheap
Has anybody but me been DVRing Conan O’Brien’s “Tonight Show” episodes this week and watching them in the morning to start the day with a good laugh?
Wow. There is no love lost between the Peacock network and O’Brien, and boy is he using his show as a bully pulpit to get in his last digs before he leaves.
On last night’s show, he joked about putting the show up for sale on Craig’s List.
On this one, I’m not joking.
Classic.
The Daily Beast’s Kim Masters reports that the late-night nightmare is almost over, and that Conan is leaving NBC with a payout, and will be free to appear on another network before his contract expires.
As Conan ponders his wide open future, leading consumer and industrial electronics giant Panasonic Corporation is reshaping its own, having announced yesterday that it is adopting IBM LotusLive’s suite of collaboration services.
Panasonic will be using LotusLive for Web conferencing, file sharing, instant messaging and project management.
It will also implement LotusLive Connections to enable business social networking between employees, partners, and suppliers to help them find other people with specific skills or knowledge and to share insight.
Panasonic will be migrating from Microsoft Exchange and other collaboration tools to LotusLive for email, calendaring, and contact management, and will present more details next week at Lotusphere in Orlando.
FYI, the global cloud computing market is expected to grow at a compounded annual rate of 28 percent from $47B last year to $126B by 2012 (based on various market estimates).
Speaking of global, IBM has also extended its LotusLive Cloud collaboration service with the availability and free trial of LotusLive Engage and LotusLive Connections in Brazilian portugese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese and Spanish.
The additional language support for the LotusLive portfolio follows the recent announcement of the availability of LotusLive iNotes, IBM’s email service that delivers the benefits of cloud computing with a focus on reliability, privacy and security, to millions of mainstream business users for $3 per user, per month.
LotusLive provides integrated email, collaboration and social networking services to simplify and improve daily business interactions with customers, partners and colleagues. A no-cost, 30-day trial of LotusLive is available at www.lotuslive.com/compare.
turbotodd
Turbotodd 