Lotus knows, but do you?

With the prospect of a conference call with Lotus today, I thought I'd better try (yet again) to get my head around the extensive and, as a non-user, confusing product set. First stop was the IBM/Lotus product pages. Quite a bit of enlightenment, but you sometimes have to drill down unnecessarily to dig out the information. For example, once you get to 'Alloy by IBM and SAP', why doesn't it have a short explanation like the next item, 'Lotus Connector for SAP Solutions', has? I knocked up my own outline so I could see all the information in one place. Sad or what?

Anyway, having kind of refreshed my memory on the product side, I turned my attention to a recent IBM Lotus event called an 'IdeaJam'. This one bore the theme of the company's latest marketing campaign called 'Lotus knows'. The purpose was to get a lot of people from the Lotus community to come up with, and comment on, ideas for getting the brand better known. The discussion was broken into four categories:

Lotus knows working smarter depends on great technology…

Lotus knows marketing is key to technology adoption…

Lotus knows technology is only great with client success…

Lotus knows the world is getting smaller, flatter and smarter...

A terrific idea, except it's a bit like asking a church choir what songs they should be singing. They're going to choose the easy ones, the catchy ones, the ones that appeal to the choir itself. At least, after such an exercise, the vicar will know how to motivate the choir. But whether the choir's choices match the vicar's or the parishioners' needs is another matter.

Still, Lotus' event was very successful by its own standards. Over 20,000 votes were cast on 928 ideas and 2246 comments were made. Ideas could be voted for or against. The top vote (302 net votes) went to putting Notes in more schools worldwide. Second top (209 net) was raising awareness of Lotus among the rest of IBM sales staff. This is astonishing when you consider that IBM bought Lotus fourteen years ago. Talk about hiding its light under a bushel.

Maybe, just maybe, Lotus would have benefitted much more and been able to direct its marketing efforts much more successfully if it were to have run ideajams with IBM mainstream staff and non-Lotus users out there in the real world. The danger is that they might say "Lotus who?" and refuse to participate.

Comments

[David Tebbutt]

I've just realised that the previous two comments will mean little to the reader of the original blog post. So, by way of enlightenment, http://www.tebbo.com/lotus.html contains my 'screen-scraped' outline of Lotus products, updated to include Sametime.

Please note that these are a snapshot in time. IBM/Lotus can, of course, update/change its site, rendering the above link out of date.

[David Tebbutt]

That is an astonishing omission. I should have realised, of course.

What I'd like to do is to partition the Lotus products according to their interdependencies - especially separating those that are standalone (and, therefore, potentially attractive to non-Lotus prospects) and those that are dependent on, say, Domino or Websphere...

If you know anyone who can help, I'll be happy to turn the findings into a useful blog post.

Thanks.

[Jacques Pavlenyi]

Dear Mr. Tebbutt:

I came across your website this morning through a colleague of mine. In the above post, you list the current portfolio of Lotus software products. I can certainly understand the frustration of trying to make sense of a broad portfolio of products. We're always trying to make our site easier to navigate and understand, so I've forwarded your comments over to our web team.

More importantly, I believe you missed a critical component of the Lotus portfolio: our Lotus Sametime products. Sametime is the IBM platform for unified communications and collaboration solutions, which includes integrated presence, instant messaging, telephony, Web conferences, and optional audio/video–all working together. And more importantly, which can be integrated with your existing office applications such as Lotus Notes or Microsoft productivity tools, web and portal applications, packaged applications, and even mashups.

It looks like there is a glitch in our Lotus Software by categories page (http://www-01.ibm.com/software/lotus/sw-bycategory/) that is erroneously omitting Sametime, so totally understand where your omission came from.

Would be happy to answer any questions you might have about Lotus Sametime.