Software: The company has so far unveiled office desktop package like Lotus Symphony and enterprise social software IBM Lotus Connections, among others.
In its efforts to thwart Microsoft, IBM had unveiled Lotus Symphony a few months back, challenging the former's dominance in the office desktop software market. The package includes a word processor, spreadsheets and a presentation suite.
Edward Orange, director, Lotus Business Unit (Software Group), IBM Asia-Pacific, said, "Since it's free, Lotus Symphony is a formidable challenge to Microsoft's new Office 2007 suite in the market for Windows-based productivity software."
Microsoft Office may still be far and away the dominant office suite, with about 95 per cent market share and over 400 million licences worldwide, but IBM is piling on the pressure with Symphony, which has seen 400,000 free downloads till date.
Armed with software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings, IBM is also aspiring to break into the Indian SME market. According to the analyst firm Frost & Sullivan, the Indian market for advanced collaboration platform is expected to grow from $10.7 million in 2006 to $22.7 million in 2008 and further double up to $41.7 million by 2010.
"Entrepreneurs and companies of up to 500 employees are a vital market for IBM in India. We have grown our software portfolio to include a new line of software business servers and software offerings are being delivered as a service on demand over the web," said Chetan Yardi, country manager, IBM Lotus Software.
The company announced plans for two offerings geared toward small businesses. "IBM Lotus Foundations will be a line of software servers sold primarily through IBM business partners and enabled through technology acquired via IBM's purchase of Net Integration Technologies, which is expected to close later in the first quarter of 2008," shared Yardi.
The first component is expected to include the Lotus Domino mail and collaboration platform, file management, directory services, firewall, back-up and recovery and office productivity tools.
Separately, a hosted service codenamed "Bluehouse" will be available in beta version and allow small-and-mid-size companies to securely collaborate outside their organisational boundaries by sharing contacts, files and activities, and interacting via chat and web meetings.
Orange and Yardi are betting on proliferation of IBM software and services that is expected to expand across devices from desktops and laptops to a range of devices from the likes of RIM (makers of Blackberry), Apple, Sprint-Nextel and Symbian and across major platforms, including Mac, Windows and Linux.
"IBM Lotus has made a number of announcements at its annual user conference, Lotusphere, where we have promised to take the company's unified communications and social networking software forward in 2008. That's good news for users who understand the value of integrating all forms of communications and collaboration in order to support their increasingly virtual workplaces," said Orange.
IBM has also introduced the next release of its enterprise social software, IBM Lotus Connections. Due in the first half of 2008, plans for Lotus Connections 2.0 include a new homepage based on Lotus mashup technology that aggregates and filters social data into a customisable view.
"Customers and IBM partners will be able to create widgets that link information to other social networks such as Yahoo or LinkedIn. The community component of Lotus Connections is expected to add discussion forums and the ability to link wiki services from IBM Lotus Quickr and SocialText," revealed Orange.
Lotus Sametime can directly use Lotus Connections community membership lists to integrate unified communications with social networking.
