We spent a lot of time at Lotusphere talking with vendors about how they are moving forward with IBM, and their views about IBM’s collaboration strategy.
In particular, we looked at companies that are integrating with IBM collaboration software products: Alfresco Software, Tungle and FewClix.
These companies are examples of how the enterprise is transforming into an environment where third-party products will integrate with existing collaboration technologies. The result is a loosely coupled ecosystem based upon Web-oriented architectures, Web services and API’s.
Alfresco Software
Alfresco, an open-source enterprise content management services company, announced an integration with IBM’s social collaboration products including Lotus Connections, Lotus Quickr and Websphere. The integration allows people to go natively into the Lotus collaboration environments. So, for example, you can collaborate with Quickr and then write some documents and publish into Alfresco. The difference here is the ability to use open protocols like REST API’s to easily make the integration, providing an open-source alternative for managing large scale content environments.
Tungle
Tungle is providing a lot of innovation in the calendar space. The Web-based service integrates with your calendar, allowing you to schedule meetings by showing your availability. This can cut down considerably on email correspondence and trying to arrange a time on your calendar. Tungle is now available with Lotus Notes.
FewClix
FewClix provides the ability to customize LotusNotes. It’s an email productivity application. With FewClix, people may prioritize their email, search and personalize and organize correspondence. FewClix is another example of a third-party application that brings deeper capabilities into the Louts Notes environment.
IBM As Enterprise Facilitator
IBM’s open Web strategy is helping it become a facilitator for the open enterprise. It’s a smart place to be in this changing world, where the ability to be adaptive is perhaps the most important aspect of a healthy enterprise environment.
For example, earlier this week we wrote about Project Vulcan, the next generation of Lotus Notes. The comments on the post were excellent in their analysis of the IBM news.
Here’s what SC McNally of MeanBusiness had to say:
IB
“IBM knows the enterprise. Tech that web-focused outfits take for granted, CIOs may find daunting. IBM helps remove the daunting.
Like it or not, much of the collaborative nature of what we’ve called Web 2.0 was spearheaded a decade ago by Ray Ozzie and his team at Lotus. It’s been refined and matured and readied to be cycled back, at great profit, into “real” businesses. Project Vulcan seems to be a start at that framework.”
