IBM Lotusphere 2008

IBM Hits the SMB Market with Hosted and Hardware-based Solutions

| Jan 23, 2008 | Application Infrastructure | Show Update

| Analyst: Brad Shimmin

Current Perspective: Very Positive
Vendor Importance: High
Market Impact: Very High

Event Summary

January 21, 2008 – At Lotusphere, IBM announced plans for a software portfolio expansion geared to the needs of companies from five to 500 employees. IBM Lotus Foundations is a future line of small business software servers, installed on-premise, and is expected to be offered primarily through IBM Business Partners. In addition, IBM announced a managed beta of a Web-delivered service codenamed "Bluehouse," which provides extranet services that make it easy for small-and-medium sized companies to securely collaborate beyond their organizational boundaries.

Analytical Summary

• Current Perspective: Very positive on IBM’s series of announcements at Lotusphere In addition to expanding its desktop productivity and collaborative bundle program to Red Hat Linux, IBM has introduced a software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution (Bluehouse) and pre-configured server (Foundations). Both are designed to lower adoption barriers, such as the upfront investment in equipment, software and staff resources that are required to deploy Lotus collaborative solutions based upon Notes and Domino. Though these two solutions are in the very early stages of development, they will allow IBM to grow its Lotus footprint within the SMB market quickly.

• Vendor Importance: High to IBM, as the firm needed to create a differentiated approach to the SaaS market that compared favorably with similar initiatives underway within the broader application infrastructure competitive set. Though the firm already possesses a number of SaaS and managed software solutions, its approach in providing componentized services derived from monolithic applications via an IBM and partner-built SaaS datacenter is unique and gives the firm a large number of options that could extend far beyond collaboration.

• Market Impact: Very high on the application and data delivery market, because while most rivals (notably Oracle/BEA, Sun, Microsoft and Progress Software) are re-architecting existing software platforms for SaaS deployment, building a SaaS delivery platform or combining these two approaches, IBM has chosen to begin with an enterprise-targeted SaaS solution focused on a very specific need for collaboration. Also, the firm’s planned hardware/software collaboration device (Foundations) is unique within the market and will allow IBM to better compete with Microsoft’s SharePoint and Small Business Server offerings. It will also help to dispel a longstanding industry perception of Lotus Notes and Domino as being monolithic, “heavy” applications.

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