The Lotus Unified Communication Keynote

This morning I visited the UC2 keynote, the Lotus Unified Communication Team private Opening General Session 😉

I loved the things I heard yesterday about the unified communication strategy, and after this mornings session I am convinced to further invest our work in the Sametime platform.

So what did I learn today:

• First: It´s Lotus Sametime 10th birthday! Wow, its a long time ago Lotus started to invest in this market – feel a little bit old remembering it is 10 years ago. Interesting information I did not know: First idea for a product name was BLIMP „Buddy List and Instant Messaging Platform“
• I was very happy to hear the first announcement: Strategic partnership with Ericsson. This is important for us because we have several customers running Ericsson PBXs who wants to integrate with Notes and Sametime – including ourselves on some locations. Hope to see first results as soon as possible.
• Several other agreements including OEM agreements with Cisco and Nortel.
• Sametime Advanced will be released in Q1 with persistent chat rooms, chat room alerts, open chat rooms for multiple users
• I love Sametime Unified Telephony! Very cool demo of managing, filtering or forwarding incoming calls depending in IM status or rules. „It does not matter what PBX you use“. Interesting statement, can not believe it, we have to dive into it – and get our hands on this.
• The IBM Metaverse meeting center was shown again as it was in the OGS. Yes, it is Second Life style. But my own Second Life avatar is hanging around in the IBM Pavillion since months. Nice to see, but no business value in there – for now.

I think UC2 / Sametime is a massiv opportunity in the next 12 months. I took some good news home today.