IBM Connections

IBM's SaaS collaboration services under the LotusLive umbrella received a lot of good reviews and always presented in the analyst top product lists. Nevertheless they haven't been very successful in sales (compared to the competitors). "What's the problem?" - IBMers tried to figure out - "Maybe the problem in the name? Or in marketing?". And they decided to copy the model of Salesforce and to see what will happen. They decided to remove the word "Lotus", which many people associate with the heavy software from the past. And instead, wherever it's possible, they put the words "Cloud" and especially "Social". In result, LotusLive becomes SmartCloud for Social Business. In its description you'll find such words as Social, Social and Social. And on the US television the new SmartCloud cartoon commercial (reminding Salesforce Chatter ads) has appeared (watch the video).

Enterprise social software developers continue to copy Facebook features. The new version of IBM's enterprise social networking software Lotus Connections 3.0 features widgets with social recommendations. First is a list of "recommended friends," that user sees when logging into Lotus Connections. The fact is that Lotus Connections also includes "friends" feature - social connections. You become a "friend" when subscribe to collegue updates (microblog). So now, basing on your existing friends, your interests and expertise and your previous actions - the system provides a list of users that you are interested in "making friends" with. Besides, when visiting other user profiles, you now can see the social path that links you to this person and things that you have in common (such as a list of the communities that both belong to). And on the communities page you can see the widget with a list communities that you might be interested in.

Gartner has published the Magic Quadrant for enterprise Social Software market 2010. In the previous similar report in 2009 the MQ reminded the Brownian movement of molecules because of the large number of vendors and approaches to the enterprise social tools. That's why Gartner decided to clarify its approach. At first, they split the Social Software for internal and external. The external was defined as Social CRM - and moved to the separate report. And this Magic Quadrant is focused only on internal social tools, designed for collaboration within enterprise. Additionally in order to mute the noise, Gartner introduced several restrictions. First, each vendor should have at least 100,000 end users. Second, each product should include the following social tools:

The geek-developer dream comes true: a full-on collaboration environment with an open API and a name right out of Star Trek. Today at the Lotushpere conference IBM unveiled Project Vulcan - the new cloud platform for collaboration and social tools, that is already compared to Google Wave. But unlike Google Wave, Vulcan - is not a separate application, but an integrated environment for all future and existing Lotus apps, including Lotus Notes and LotusLive. Vulcan will be available to developers in the second half of 2010, and meanwhile it will be available to LotusLive Labs team, which has already shown 4 new projects for LotusLive: