IBM Session at Cloud Expo

IBM in Monday announced the technology and business expansion of its LotusLive cloud collaboration platform through a new R&D pipeline from IBM Research and plans to open the LotusLive suite to new partners.

LotusLive cloud services provide integrated email, Web conferencing, social networking and collaboration with IBM's focus on security, and reliability.

IBM Research and Lotus are joining forces to deliver new innovation on the Web through the creation of LotusLive Labs -- a proving ground for advances in business-driven collaboration in the cloud.

Known for pushing the boundaries of science, technology and business to build a smarter planet, IBM researchers have been recognized with five Nobel prizes.

In 2009, IBM received 4,914 US patents -- marking the 17th consecutive year it has topped the list of the world's most inventive companies. IBM Research and Lotus will accelerate the pipeline for business-focused innovation for LotusLive.

At Lotusphere 2010 this week, a range of LotusLive Labs technology previews are being unveiled including:

• Slide Library, a collaborative way to build and share presentations;
• 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; and,
• Composer, the ability to create LotusLive mashups through the combination of LotusLive services.

Expected in second quarter of 2010 via LotusLive Labs, Project Concord is a new Web-based document editor for creating and sharing documents, presentations and spreadsheets.

A Platform for Integration
IBM also announced the extension of the core collaboration services of LotusLive to third-party applications and business processes. Previously available only through the LotusLive Design Partner program, IBM will make application programming interfaces (APIs) for LotusLive services available to any IBM business partner in the second half of 2010. In addition, three LotusLive Design Partners are scheduled to bring their solutions to market in Q2 including:

• Silanis Technology: electronic signature process management integrated with LotusLive Files and Activities
• Skype: voice and video calling integrated with LotusLive Contacts
• Prolifiq: one to one branded sales messaging platform integrated with LotusLive Contacts and Files

IBM is also working with several new integration partners including PGi (formerly Premiere Global Services), a leading global provider of meeting and collaboration solutions that energize people and organizations to connect more meaningfully. PGi will resell LotusLive Meetings, integrated with its audio conferencing platform.

IBM also announced the expansion of benefits for IBM business partners, including no-cost, 12-month LotusLive demo accounts as well as a number of partner programs to help partners succeed in selling LotusLive services.

Details on partner benefits and programs as well as information on the Design Partner program are available at www.lotuslive.com/businesspartners.

"Lotus knows that helping customers work with people outside and inside their companies, especially in the context of a business process, is important," said Sean Poulley, vice president, IBM Cloud Collaboration. "By making it easy for partners to weave cloud-based social networking, collaboration and communication tools into their applications, customers will gain powerful new ways to solve business problems."

New Service Enhancements
The next version of LotusLive Notes will provide email, calendar, contact management and instant messaging capabilities to customers in a multi-tenant environment. The LotusLive Notes service will be optimized to support hybrid on-premise and cloud deployments with standard support for directory synchronization between on-premise directories and the cloud, access to application and mail workflows that remain on-premise, and entitlement for every user to use either a browser or the Lotus Notes client to access their email. New services and options will include a reduction in the minimum number of users for a LotusLive Notes subscription from 1,000 to 25, IBM Lotus Sametime instant messaging support and a 5GB standard mailbox quota. IBM is now accepting requests to participate in the LotusLive Notes managed beta program at www.lotuslive.com/en/services/notes.