It’s kind of hilarious that William Shatner opened the IBM Lotusphere event today, especially now that IBM is launching Project Vulcan.
As one blogger asked: “You could not get Leonard Nimoy?” This is a geek dream come true: a full-on collaboration environment with an open API and a name right out of Star Trek fame.
Project Vulcan is catching some attention here at IBM’s annual Lotusphere event in Orlando. It isn’t set for developer release until the second half of this year, but its potential as an all-encompassing cloud-based collaboration service is causing many to compare it to Google Wave.
Project Vulcan is being described as the next generation of Lotus Notes. It’s an aggregation or federation of email, calendars, profiles, to do lists and social analytics all in one place. It’s designed to filter out noise from real-time conversations, make recommendations and provide relevant content.
Sounds a lot like Google Wave.
Here’s how IBM’s Ed Brill describes the Project Vulcan concept:
“IBM Project Vulcan is not a brand-new effort. It builds on the existing capabilities, and represents the future versions of, the IBM Lotus product portfolio – including Notes. One of its key themes is social analytics and business analytics combined and applied to industry-specific scenarios – making collaboration more focused and relevant. The vision of Project Vulcan intends to deliver collaboration across company boundaries; make it easy to deploy the technology; and include developer-friendly services and APIs.”
We think Project Vulcan looks pretty exciting. It’s being built with the right foundation, as a platform of loosely coupled systems. As Brill says:
“This makes sense in an increasingly-expected hybrid environment, and will simplify deployment and adoption of collaboration and productivity within your organization. Web services, xPages, HTML5, RESTful APIs, will all be tools in pushing Project Vulcan forward.”
IBM is looking like it has its act together in the collaboration space. Project Vulcan is being developed out of LotusLive Labs, the new R&D pipeline for cloud-based collaboration.
The lab is developing collaboration services that are being previewed here this week at the Lotusphere conference. These include:
- Slide Library: A collaborative way to build and share presentations.
- Collaborative Recorded Meetings: A service that records and transcribes meeting presentations and audio/video for searching and tagging.
- Event Map: An interactive way to visualize and interact with conference schedules.
Project Vulcan fits right into the future of enterprise collaboration. Its Web-oriented architecture and open APIs give it a foundation that will be well suited to how the enterprise will function in the years ahead.
