The Wainhouse Research Bulletin NEWS AND VIEWS ON REAL-TIME UNIFIED COMMUNICATIONS As always, please feel free to forward this newsletter to your colleagues. To be added to our FREE automated email distribution list, simply visit www.wainhouse.com/bulletin. Andrew W. Davis,
[email protected] Lotusphere 2009 Highlights WR analysts Andy Nilssen and Brent Kelly carried the Wainhouse Research banner at the Lotusphere 2009 conference held in Orlando January 18 – January 22. One surprising tidbit was that attendance for the 7,000+ end users attending the event was up 2% over last year, which correlates with our recent WRB survey that spending in conferencing and collaboration, and IT in general is expected to be slightly UP over 2008 levels in spite of the current economic difficulties. IBM Lotus and its partners made many announcements including: ¾ LotusLive (www.lotuslive.com), a cloud-based portfolio of social networking and collaboration services designed for business. For those familiar with Bluehouse, IBM’s year-long beta of its services offering, LotusLive is the resulting commercial version. The current quick services list includes IM/Presence (think Sametime), web conferencing (Unyte), colleague networking (think Connections), activities (to-do lists, project tracking), file repository (with access control, revision tracking); email will be added shortly (based in part on IBM’s recent acquisition of Outblaze). Proving that LotusLive is going to be more than just what Lotus can muster (and, it turns out, to help get the word out as well) Lotus also announced LotusLive will integrate with the service offerings from LinkedIn (people search), Skype (VoIP & video conferencing), and Salesforce.com – offerings that touch over 400 million users today.