IBM's Jonathan Stern outlines Lotus collaborative and social software strategy (iTWire podcast)

Tony Austin
Friday, 16 January 2009 12:45

Opinion and Analysis

A week or two before Christmas last year, I was fortunate to interview Jonathan Stern, IBM ANZ Regional Executive for Lotus Software, but for a number of reasons (including a disk crash followed by days of painful data recovery, merging into the end-of-year holiday hiatus) I haven't been able to prepare the podcast before this.

In a wide-ranging discussion, Jonathan explained and positioned the various Lotus Software products.

Here's a timeline of the podcast (minutes, seconds):

• - 00:00 ... Introducing IBM's Jonathan Stern
• - 01:44 ... Lotus is all about collaboration and people productivity
• - 04:43 ... Lotus provides the broadest range of collaborative capabilities
• - 05:27 ... People generations and their adopted collaboration types
• - 08:04 ... E-mail is not yet dead!
• - 09:07 ... People-centric view of the world
• - 09:45 ... What is Lotus Sametime?
• - 10:54 ... Sametime and Web conferencing (virtual meetings)
• - 11:19 ... Sametime versus the non-enterprise Instant Messaging clients
• - 12:06 ... Convergence between Sametime and IP telephony -- unified communications and collaboration (UCC)
• - 14:01 ... Community centric collaboration, Social software, Lotus Connections
• - 14:54 ... People profiles, corporate directories (such as IBM's "Blue Pages"), the usefulness of bookmark links (a.k.a. "dogears"), the value of expertise location, blogs, wikis
• - 19:05 ... Types of organizations that have taken up Lotus Connections
• - 21:27 ... Lotus and the embracing of open standards
• - 22:13 ... Cloud computing and SaaS (Software as a Service)
• - 22:42 ... Web conferencing via Lotus Sametime Unyte
• - 23:26 ... Lotus Foundations and IBM Bluehouse
• - 25:41 ... Lotus Symphony, Open Office and Microsoft Office, document interchange capabilities
• - 27:38 ... The massive take up of Lotus Symphony worldwide, and governmental mandates for use of ODF (Open Document Format)
• - 29:01 ... The re-architecting of Lotus Notes/Domino 8.0 and 8.5
• - 30:53 ... Lotus Notes 8.5 [released early January 2009]
• - 32:06 ... User acceptance of Notes 8 modern look and feel

The audio file for this enlightening podcast with Jonathan Stern (the IBM ANZ regional executive responsible for Lotus Software) is available here (MP3 format, file size approximately 15.4 MB, duration 33:36).