SaaS takes centre stage at Lotusphere
One year on from the launch of IBM Lotus's first home-grown effort in the world of software-as-a-service, codenamed project "Bluehouse", SaaS is again top of the news agenda at Lotusphere 2009, and shows up as an underlying theme across the event's big stories.
The main headline was the
launch of LotusLive, a new brand for the company's cloud-based services, which will incorporate Bluehouse, Sametime Unyte Meetings, Sametime Unyte Events and Lotus Notes Hosted Messaging, as well as a all future offerings in this space, one of which I'll come to in a moment. In line with the new branding, each of the above products will be renamed, with the aforementioned products becoming "LotusLive Engage", "LotusLive Meetings", "LotusLive Events" and "LotusLive Notes" respectively.
Alongside this was more detail about last week's announcement of IBM's
intent to acquire the assets of Outblaze, a Hong Kong-based provider of white-label, SaaS-based webmail services. Upon completion, IBM plans to offer the Outblaze technology as part of LotusLive, under the name LotusLive iNotes. In addition to adding breadth to the LotusLive portfolio which it is selling direct, IBM sees the Outblaze acquisition as providing a new business model, helping the company to develop the SaaS reseller channel through value-added services.
Other major news from Lotusphere centred on partnering activities at IBM, and again SaaS played a central role - Salesforce.com integration with LotusLive Engage and Lotus Notes, integration between the LinkedIn business social network and contacts within LotusLive Engage, and between LotusLive Engage and Skype for VoIP calls.
IBM is clearly determined to show it has a credible story in SaaS, and is working hard to deliver a portfolio which mirrors its breadth in the on-premise software space. The biggest opportunity for IBM in SaaS - particularly with the Engage offering - is clearly the SMB market, and it will be interesting to see whether it is successful here, or whether LotusLive simply becomes an extension of its established enterprise portfolio. In any case, these announcements demonstrate that it is prepared to square up to Microsoft in the battle for supremacy in the cloud.
Keep your eyes open for a new report on Collaboration-as-a-Service which we'll be publishing within the
MWD Collaboration advisory service over the next couple of weeks.
Labels: collaboration, ibm, SaaS
