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The ready-to-use SMB combo offering, called Lotus Foundations and Bluehouse, would eliminate the need for hiring infotech staff, and would be available sometime later this year. This could be of major interest to Indian small and medium enterprises, which are growing at a 30 percent clip, in cutting costs and become more competitive globally.
"This offering could change the rules of the game. It's an absolute killer," Chetan Yardi, IBM country head of India, Lotus Software, said at the sidelines of the event, attended by some 7,000 participants, including IBM's business partners and users.
Lotusphere will also be replayed in India, as is the practice, in March. Lotus Foundations would be a line of small servers installed at the SMB premises; it will be offered through IBM business partners. The offering would include a pre-loaded one-stop-solution for small companies, typically with up to 500 employees.
It will have Lotus Domino mail and collaboration platform, file management, firewall, backup and recovery. Bluehouse, announced as limited beta offering, will provide, extranet services, making it easier for SMBs to securely collaborate beyond their organisational boundaries.
To address the varied needs of a younger, globalised workforce, Big Blue said it planned to ship Lotus Notes and Domino 8.0.1 next month with important updates that build on the power of the Web. (Lotus Notes is the software which runs on the user's end while Domino refers to the server side.)
The first feature in the new release, called My Widget, can be used to, say, receive real time flight info by simply clicking on a flight number in an email. Users can drag and drop widgets such as Google Gadgets, feeds and Web pages onto their new widgets panel in the Lotus sidebar.
Another offering, Lotus Traveller, would provide automatic realtime wireless replication of email for Microsoft Windows Mobile devices and the iPhone. IBM also previewed the next major release, Lotus Notes & Domino 8.5, that would include enhancements to the Domino Web application environment. It also added a new email security appliance, Lotus Protector, which would enable companies to protect data.
According to IBM, Lotus Notes and Domino lineup has roughly 140 million users. Figures for India were unavailable. Probably by next week, downloads of Lotus Symphony beta 4, the next version of the popular suite of no-charges desktop productivity tools, will commence. This would provide IBM business partners a new market opportunity to extend their application through both Eclipse plug-ins and Java.
In a fresh partnership initiative, IBM and SAP announced their first joint software product called Atlantic, which will integrate Lotus Notes and SAP Business Suite. This would up the return on investment user companies made on their SAP applications.
Lotus Software general manager Mike Rhodin told the conference Atlantic creates "a richer collaboration environment" which the mutual users of Lotus and SAP were seeking for long.
IBM will offer an integrated Lotus Open Collaboration Client Solution with support for Ubuntu, a Linux-based operating system from Canonical. IBM also announced a new pact with Red Hat to combine Red Hat Linux Advanced Platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop, Lotus Notes Client with Lotus Symphony and Domino server.
To see more of The Economic Times, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://economictimes.indiatimes.com Copyright (c) 2008, The Economic Times, India Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services. For reprints, email tmsreprints@permissionsgroup.com, call 800-374-7985 or 847-635-6550, send a fax to 847-635-6968, or write to The Permissions Group Inc., 1247 Milwaukee Ave., Suite 303, Glenview, IL 60025, USA.
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