We saw in the Twitter stream yesterday a slide for IBM’s new social business tool kit that is being unveiied today at Lotusphere. The details are bare but you can see how social business will take center stage this week at the annual event.
The social tool kit is a developer play as pointed out by RedMonk’s James Governor in a recent post. IBM is a heavy adopter of social technologies that have been developed in consumer, social technologies. Developing a tool kit is a smart, natural step and a necessary one for IBM. Getting beyond the image of a legacy technology still dogs Lotus. IBM needs developers in order to make the mind shift with customers that Lotus is a platform more than a network of apps.
Last year at Lotusphere IBM launched Project Vulcan. It’s an open framework. You can see how it dovetails with the social business tool kit being discussed this week.
Governor noted IBM’s change in view after attending an IBM analyst event late last year where Lotus General Manager Alistair Rennie used language that shows the developer play that Lotus is making.
Governor noted some of the terms he used include:
- Social Business platform design principles
- web UI (see ibm project vulcan)
- strong aggregator toolkit
- mobile first as a design point
- embedded experience
- security model from the ground up
This falls in line with Project Vulcan and the standards it will support:
- OpenSocial
- Oauth
- SAML
- CMIS
- ATOM
- ActivityStreams
- HTML5
- OpenAJAX
We’ll see how developers view this approach by IBM. But it’s obvious that IBM is making a play for the social business market. Lotusphere this year will include a Social Business Symposium, another sign of the focus that IBM is putting on in providing a social platform.
