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NEW DELHI
FEBRUARY 27, 2007
IBM successfully conducted its Lotusphere in the capital on February 20,
2007. This is an annual event for those customers who couldn't get to Orlando,
where the main five-day Lotusphere event was held. The event was conceptualized
to keep attendees abreast about the latest product developments around IBM's
software.
R Dhamodaran, Director-Software Group, IBM India/South Asia said, "It is
perhaps the most efficient way for customers to keep up with what is happening
with Domino and Lotus. The event, which is designed to be informative and
insightful, has various sessions to effectively cater to the diverse set of
audience attending Lotusphere."
Antony Satyadas, Chief Competitive Marketing Officer, IBM Software Group
informed that the event has various sessions like 'Future and Innovations',
which concentrated on new technologies and innovations coming from the company's
labs. The 'Hands-On Track' presented a unique opportunity for attendees to
not only hear the talk, but to use the products as well. "Instructors will
spend part of the session teaching the subject matter, and then the remainder
time will be spent walking the attendees through their process, allowing them do
the work themselves," he said.
The event also had other sessions on application development and
infrastructure wherein product functionality; security, administration,
directories and performance were discussed in detail. Dhamodaran elaborated that
the event was used as a platform to bring new offerings to the table. He further
noted, "Our sessions throw light on new technologies and innovations coming
from our labs, including exciting new technologies and glimpses of the future
from industry gurus."
"The new version of Lotus Sametime instant messaging and collaboration
software will be available in the second quarter of 2007. It provides an open,
extensible software platform that integrates rich presence, IM, email, unified
messaging, Web, voice, video, telephony and business applications across
multi-vendor environments," said Satyadas.
The company's officials said that Lotus is being reinvented through IBM's
strong support of open standards. The Lotus Sametime 7.5 is the first to offer a
major enterprise collaboration platform built on Eclipse framework. "The
openness of Eclipse gives our partners and customers the flexibility they need
to build a unified collaboration platform designed to meet the challenges of
their business in an open and accessible environment," added Dhamodaran.
The event also touched upon another solutoin targeted at the SMB - WebSphere
Portal Express Version 6.0. This is a collaborative portal solution that helps
customers deploy a variety of web solutions be more responsive to their
customers.
In addition, IBM announced the Lotus Notes' open beta program starting this
month. The new client includes upgrades to core applications and expanded
integration with the new collaboration tools announced today. IBM also gave an
overview of Lotus Notes and Lotus Domino 8 that will include advanced usability
features and new interface to manage information overload.
The event saw the participation of customers - existing and potential - as
well as business partners and software developers. Lotusphere reportedly boasts
a year-to-year attendee return rate of 90 percent, far above the industry
average of 50-60 percent. "One reason attendees keep coming back is that
Lotusphere is an event where customers and partners can get first-hand, hands-on
information about IBM collaboration software directly from the people who
develop and market it," informed Dhamodaran. Page(s) 1
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