Bob Picciano on IBM Lotus Smarter Work
Friday morning I had the distinct pleasure
of participating in a blogger conference call with IBM Lotus General Manager
Bob Picciano. Bob was there to discuss
IBM's Smarter Work initiative
with specific talking points related to his
recent op-ed at CIO.com.
Bob started with a summary of the Smart Work strategy. I won't transcribe the whole thing here, but there were two excellent quotes from that introduction...
The good stuff, as always, came with the Q&A. Click the permalink for my abridged transcription. You'll find plenty of editor's notes and added emphasis on what I think are the highlights.
Bob started with a summary of the Smart Work strategy. I won't transcribe the whole thing here, but there were two excellent quotes from that introduction...
We're helping customers cut out 30% of their TCO in 90 days or less with the innovations of 8.5 as they migrate from Microsoft... or as they upgrade from previous versions of Notes.
[Smart Work also about ubiquity. It's not just a smart company thought. It's a community notion. It has to use cloud computing to align your interests with your trading partners.
The good stuff, as always, came with the Q&A. Click the permalink for my abridged transcription. You'll find plenty of editor's notes and added emphasis on what I think are the highlights.
Jack
Dausman: You're not saying Smart
Work is a euphemism for IBM services?
Bob: Absolutely not. It's about people on the Smart Planet and how we help them overcome the struggles of information overload, context misalignment, process breakdowns, and trust in information, and bringing together not just what we do, but syndicated and external information sources as well.
Jack: How do you see this fitting into the Linux client, which I find really fascinating as a thin edge to make some change.
Bob: "Wow!" about your insightfulness around Linux! We need smarter client technology, smarter broad access to technology to allow us to attain the full potential of what the Smart Planet means. {Note to Bob: check out Alex Tabarrok's TED Talk!} We've worked on and delivered the Open Client for Collaboration Software, which is based on an Ubuntu client. It's an important complement. You see the alignment of things like Symphony with our value proposition with Linux. We've been very pleased with the market's broader acceptance of alternative client technologies. Certainly there's always been a lot in the context of a mobile environment, but that's much more hidden. We see a pretty significant shift in terms of what people are running on a laptop client as well. The BSD kernel inside of a Mac client opens up more opportunity for people to be accepting that these Linux client technologies have a lot to offer. Netbooks are a darned good alternative at a very attractive price point and can help eliminate other costs.
Nathan: In that CIO.com article, you made a statement about "pushing Linux on the desktop towards critical mass." Can you define what you see as critical mass? Defining a year as 'the year of Linux on the desktop' is internet legend at this point. How do you see that taking place? Netbooks is one -- do you have other thoughts in mind about how that's going to happen?
Bob: Sure. I hope not to be the subject of Mythbusters! ... First and foremost, it's netbooks. But I've been to Africa and I understand people wanting to create topologies at much lower price points and with much more resiliency. Now with Ubuntu, you see some very slick interfaces and capability. In the past, Linux distros were clearly more focused on IT and the data center, and I see some important shifts in that now. I also think that the contribution of Mac as a client alternative is shaking people up to understand that there's no reason I couldn't have the same level of proficiency with a slick client like Ubuntu. We also see the creation of applications, widgets and gadgets that help create value, whether coming through the Notes client or a browser or through Portal.
Nathan: You mentioned emerging markets, and you mentioned application support being key. Do you see major enterprise vendors in the hardware space starting to do desktop pre-loads and how do you think IBM can impact that and make that get out to a broad market in a place where there isn't that much democratization yet -- since people don't get a lot of options picking out the PC that's going to be on their desk, even if they get options in figuring out what they're going to do with it.
Bob: In the dialogs that I've had in the last four or five months there has been a dramatic shift in the CIO's office about what they need to do to manage costs. With Project: Liberate, we've helped clients save over 3 billion dollars in understanding how they license code from Microsoft. And Microsoft is making it even more difficult to comply with them by removing non-perpetual licenses from their agreements, which will force more disruption in the organization at all levels. There are players like Asus and Arcos that are driving the hardware alignment with the Linux client on 30% on the netbooks. That definitely drives towards critical mass. The other aspect of the applications is that it's not necessarily the traditional apps -- they can be apps that come through SaaS, web services, widgets and gadgets which are much less dependent on underlying technology, and as a consequence act as an enabler.
Gregg Eldred: With the new look at the people side of all of this, are we going to see new marketing messages geared towards people?
Bob: You'll see a continual stream of all sorts of different formats of marketing from us... really taking a different angle on the market. It's important and relevant to do it, not just for Lotus but for IBM and the world right now. There's been a shift in people's understanding on how to participate and their desire to have some of these CIO challenges addressed. And we have a great story, including rich social enterprise computing platforms and social analytics. So the short answer is: yes. It's too early for me to roll out some of that out yet. I knew about the Smart Work Op-Ad we were taking out in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, but it's also not the same area, or publication, or community or sustainability or volume that we need to continue to roll. And that's a key focus of what we need to address properly to help the Lotus business continue to grow.
Chris Toohey: You'd mentioned that collaboration was the heart of the Smart Work initiative. Do you see certain products in the Lotus portfolio coming to the foreground? And conversely do you see some products falling to the background? Would we leverage more cloud services? Or are we looking at streamlining Domino? What's the break down as you see it to really drive this initiative home?
Bob: First off, I'm really a very passionate technologist, and I'm very happy with our portfolio. I think we've got a multi-facetted set of capabilities that address the needs of collaboration from a lot of different entry points. And I think there's more things coming out this year that are seminal in where collaboration becomes connected to Smarter Planet. With things like unified telephony, voice collaboration and CEBP {Communications Enabled Business Processes -- I had to look it up} that gets enabled because people want VoIP, but along with it you get benefits like presence, control, profiling, integration with workflow all through this aspect of wanting to make cheap phone calls. Another entry point is Foundations. I'm real happy with the eWeek review that just came out where they finally got the message. There are places where the network infrastructure is just not there; there is a need for on-prem. And Domino and Notes do the most amazing job, and when it's packaged into something like Foundations, it's a killer app for small business. And we've been gaining a lot of momentum. I think you'll see some very aggressive pieces start to come out as early as next week about what's happening with Foundations.
Certainly LotusLive is seminal technology in this intercompany collaboration. In many ways, it's a catalyzer with companies large and small about what the potential is, but it's also important for us to start the Lotus story. So it may start on a dialog about LotusLive, and it may have a lot to do about what they need for their business, but there are also rich capabilities that we offer in the on-prem versions of our software that aren't matched, and probably won't be for quite some time, with what we've delivered in the cloud. So I see blending of solutions. Every customer I've talked to wants a little bit of both.
Expeditor is a tremendous entry point as well, and that's probably not something people talk a lot about. When you think about delivering collaboration with a deeply aligned industry solution -- smart banking, smart trading, smart insurance, smart water -- all of that needs a high-speed capability to include all sorts of information. Expeditor is taking an important position in industry initiatives to be that connection point.
Portal is another one, where people are getting incredible economies of scale out of the existing infrastructure and now using Mashups to lower the cost and create even more fluid innovation around situational apps.
I've probably gone on too long with this answer, but I could talk all day about our portfolio. I love it. I'm really happy with where we are.
Nathan: You should be.
Jack Dausman: You mentioned OCCS. There's not much news in the Linux community about what you're doing. I'd like to know how you see that changing. Preloads were mentioned earlier -- how do you see Symphony in that?
Bob: We do have distro alignments with RedHat, Novell and Canonical around OCCS. We can do more to promote those. I think Smart Work gives us a new platform to talk about "a new client for working smarter together." We will reach deeper into the OS environment and platform of choice. I think you're pointing out more good guidance on what we need to continue to do, and that's fair. We need to work with those partners. I think they're seeing the same shift and there's more interest. As a matter of fact, I'll be meeting with Mark Shuttleworth soon on these specific topics.
On Symphony, we continue to see a lot of volume. We're coming to the next release soon where we integrate more Office 2007 capabilities, and the work that we're doing with OCCS provides a nice distribution point. We need to exploit other distribution points. I'm happy with the quality and awards we're getting on Symphony, but we need to do work on making sure the message gets out, and we cross the next threshold, which is 10 million [users]. We're about halfway there.
Nathan: You talked about managing workforces through human networks and employee skills and interest cataloging. The Lotus portfolio right now has those capabilities in silos, so you have profile information in Connections, or Notes, or Sametime. What are you thinking about how to bring that together?
Bob: Those are all on our mind that we're working on. We need to unify our architectures across this space. It's too early to lay any of that out. It's nice to talk about these kinds of important big things at Lotusphere, when we can build steam up to that as an important announcement, and show the next level of advancements we're making on the portfolio.
This is in silos today, however, the capability exists for companies to manage their teams and organizations progressively through us today. When I show people Atlas and what we've done with our internal implementation, SmallBlue -- I was with a client the other day, and we went to this person's LinkedIn profile on the sideshelf of Notes from an email someone had sent with this person's name in it. So we had the LiveText integration. We saw that the background they had was on joint ventures. So we clicked on joint ventures, which we linked to SmallBlue, and it pulled up the interactive network diagram inside IBM of all of our experts on joint ventures. We were able to navigate that spider diagram and able to pick out two or three people in the middle of it, and they were high-profile enough that this individual knew those names.
Nathan [interrupting]: Now THAT is a viral YouTube video, right there.
Bob: Yeah. We should tap it. I agree with you. It was like when people see that first mashup to be able to join a spreadsheet with an IMF database and be able to click on a name to make a call, all inside a mashup client. You can see the wheels going and a gasp in the room. There's so much more potential on what we can do today. We've got to get the word out.
Bruce Elgort: Bob, do you Twitter?
Bob: No, but I read lots of blogs. And people tell me about important Twitter topics.
I was hesitant to post this last thing, because it's going to seem like an ego-trip. I'm posting it not because it says something about me, but because it says something about how IBM is hearing and embracing the message they're getting from the Lotus community right now. This is the recording of the first 60 seconds of Bob's response to my first question. You can imagine my reaction.
Bob: Absolutely not. It's about people on the Smart Planet and how we help them overcome the struggles of information overload, context misalignment, process breakdowns, and trust in information, and bringing together not just what we do, but syndicated and external information sources as well.
Jack: How do you see this fitting into the Linux client, which I find really fascinating as a thin edge to make some change.
Bob: "Wow!" about your insightfulness around Linux! We need smarter client technology, smarter broad access to technology to allow us to attain the full potential of what the Smart Planet means. {Note to Bob: check out Alex Tabarrok's TED Talk!} We've worked on and delivered the Open Client for Collaboration Software, which is based on an Ubuntu client. It's an important complement. You see the alignment of things like Symphony with our value proposition with Linux. We've been very pleased with the market's broader acceptance of alternative client technologies. Certainly there's always been a lot in the context of a mobile environment, but that's much more hidden. We see a pretty significant shift in terms of what people are running on a laptop client as well. The BSD kernel inside of a Mac client opens up more opportunity for people to be accepting that these Linux client technologies have a lot to offer. Netbooks are a darned good alternative at a very attractive price point and can help eliminate other costs.
Nathan: In that CIO.com article, you made a statement about "pushing Linux on the desktop towards critical mass." Can you define what you see as critical mass? Defining a year as 'the year of Linux on the desktop' is internet legend at this point. How do you see that taking place? Netbooks is one -- do you have other thoughts in mind about how that's going to happen?
Bob: Sure. I hope not to be the subject of Mythbusters! ... First and foremost, it's netbooks. But I've been to Africa and I understand people wanting to create topologies at much lower price points and with much more resiliency. Now with Ubuntu, you see some very slick interfaces and capability. In the past, Linux distros were clearly more focused on IT and the data center, and I see some important shifts in that now. I also think that the contribution of Mac as a client alternative is shaking people up to understand that there's no reason I couldn't have the same level of proficiency with a slick client like Ubuntu. We also see the creation of applications, widgets and gadgets that help create value, whether coming through the Notes client or a browser or through Portal.
Nathan: You mentioned emerging markets, and you mentioned application support being key. Do you see major enterprise vendors in the hardware space starting to do desktop pre-loads and how do you think IBM can impact that and make that get out to a broad market in a place where there isn't that much democratization yet -- since people don't get a lot of options picking out the PC that's going to be on their desk, even if they get options in figuring out what they're going to do with it.
Bob: In the dialogs that I've had in the last four or five months there has been a dramatic shift in the CIO's office about what they need to do to manage costs. With Project: Liberate, we've helped clients save over 3 billion dollars in understanding how they license code from Microsoft. And Microsoft is making it even more difficult to comply with them by removing non-perpetual licenses from their agreements, which will force more disruption in the organization at all levels. There are players like Asus and Arcos that are driving the hardware alignment with the Linux client on 30% on the netbooks. That definitely drives towards critical mass. The other aspect of the applications is that it's not necessarily the traditional apps -- they can be apps that come through SaaS, web services, widgets and gadgets which are much less dependent on underlying technology, and as a consequence act as an enabler.
Gregg Eldred: With the new look at the people side of all of this, are we going to see new marketing messages geared towards people?
Bob: You'll see a continual stream of all sorts of different formats of marketing from us... really taking a different angle on the market. It's important and relevant to do it, not just for Lotus but for IBM and the world right now. There's been a shift in people's understanding on how to participate and their desire to have some of these CIO challenges addressed. And we have a great story, including rich social enterprise computing platforms and social analytics. So the short answer is: yes. It's too early for me to roll out some of that out yet. I knew about the Smart Work Op-Ad we were taking out in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, but it's also not the same area, or publication, or community or sustainability or volume that we need to continue to roll. And that's a key focus of what we need to address properly to help the Lotus business continue to grow.
Chris Toohey: You'd mentioned that collaboration was the heart of the Smart Work initiative. Do you see certain products in the Lotus portfolio coming to the foreground? And conversely do you see some products falling to the background? Would we leverage more cloud services? Or are we looking at streamlining Domino? What's the break down as you see it to really drive this initiative home?
Bob: First off, I'm really a very passionate technologist, and I'm very happy with our portfolio. I think we've got a multi-facetted set of capabilities that address the needs of collaboration from a lot of different entry points. And I think there's more things coming out this year that are seminal in where collaboration becomes connected to Smarter Planet. With things like unified telephony, voice collaboration and CEBP {Communications Enabled Business Processes -- I had to look it up} that gets enabled because people want VoIP, but along with it you get benefits like presence, control, profiling, integration with workflow all through this aspect of wanting to make cheap phone calls. Another entry point is Foundations. I'm real happy with the eWeek review that just came out where they finally got the message. There are places where the network infrastructure is just not there; there is a need for on-prem. And Domino and Notes do the most amazing job, and when it's packaged into something like Foundations, it's a killer app for small business. And we've been gaining a lot of momentum. I think you'll see some very aggressive pieces start to come out as early as next week about what's happening with Foundations.
Certainly LotusLive is seminal technology in this intercompany collaboration. In many ways, it's a catalyzer with companies large and small about what the potential is, but it's also important for us to start the Lotus story. So it may start on a dialog about LotusLive, and it may have a lot to do about what they need for their business, but there are also rich capabilities that we offer in the on-prem versions of our software that aren't matched, and probably won't be for quite some time, with what we've delivered in the cloud. So I see blending of solutions. Every customer I've talked to wants a little bit of both.
Expeditor is a tremendous entry point as well, and that's probably not something people talk a lot about. When you think about delivering collaboration with a deeply aligned industry solution -- smart banking, smart trading, smart insurance, smart water -- all of that needs a high-speed capability to include all sorts of information. Expeditor is taking an important position in industry initiatives to be that connection point.
Portal is another one, where people are getting incredible economies of scale out of the existing infrastructure and now using Mashups to lower the cost and create even more fluid innovation around situational apps.
I've probably gone on too long with this answer, but I could talk all day about our portfolio. I love it. I'm really happy with where we are.
Nathan: You should be.
Jack Dausman: You mentioned OCCS. There's not much news in the Linux community about what you're doing. I'd like to know how you see that changing. Preloads were mentioned earlier -- how do you see Symphony in that?
Bob: We do have distro alignments with RedHat, Novell and Canonical around OCCS. We can do more to promote those. I think Smart Work gives us a new platform to talk about "a new client for working smarter together." We will reach deeper into the OS environment and platform of choice. I think you're pointing out more good guidance on what we need to continue to do, and that's fair. We need to work with those partners. I think they're seeing the same shift and there's more interest. As a matter of fact, I'll be meeting with Mark Shuttleworth soon on these specific topics.
On Symphony, we continue to see a lot of volume. We're coming to the next release soon where we integrate more Office 2007 capabilities, and the work that we're doing with OCCS provides a nice distribution point. We need to exploit other distribution points. I'm happy with the quality and awards we're getting on Symphony, but we need to do work on making sure the message gets out, and we cross the next threshold, which is 10 million [users]. We're about halfway there.
Nathan: You talked about managing workforces through human networks and employee skills and interest cataloging. The Lotus portfolio right now has those capabilities in silos, so you have profile information in Connections, or Notes, or Sametime. What are you thinking about how to bring that together?
Bob: Those are all on our mind that we're working on. We need to unify our architectures across this space. It's too early to lay any of that out. It's nice to talk about these kinds of important big things at Lotusphere, when we can build steam up to that as an important announcement, and show the next level of advancements we're making on the portfolio.
This is in silos today, however, the capability exists for companies to manage their teams and organizations progressively through us today. When I show people Atlas and what we've done with our internal implementation, SmallBlue -- I was with a client the other day, and we went to this person's LinkedIn profile on the sideshelf of Notes from an email someone had sent with this person's name in it. So we had the LiveText integration. We saw that the background they had was on joint ventures. So we clicked on joint ventures, which we linked to SmallBlue, and it pulled up the interactive network diagram inside IBM of all of our experts on joint ventures. We were able to navigate that spider diagram and able to pick out two or three people in the middle of it, and they were high-profile enough that this individual knew those names.
Nathan [interrupting]: Now THAT is a viral YouTube video, right there.
Bob: Yeah. We should tap it. I agree with you. It was like when people see that first mashup to be able to join a spreadsheet with an IMF database and be able to click on a name to make a call, all inside a mashup client. You can see the wheels going and a gasp in the room. There's so much more potential on what we can do today. We've got to get the word out.
Bruce Elgort: Bob, do you Twitter?
Bob: No, but I read lots of blogs. And people tell me about important Twitter topics.
I was hesitant to post this last thing, because it's going to seem like an ego-trip. I'm posting it not because it says something about me, but because it says something about how IBM is hearing and embracing the message they're getting from the Lotus community right now. This is the recording of the first 60 seconds of Bob's response to my first question. You can imagine my reaction.
Comments
Posted by Erik Brooks At 07:58:08 PM On 05/10/2009 |
Posted by Carl Tyler At 08:17:39 PM On 05/10/2009 |
Posted by francie At 09:06:36 PM On 05/10/2009 |
Posted by Bruce Elgort At 12:20:56 AM On 05/11/2009 |
Posted by pc5250 At 03:11:53 AM On 05/11/2009 |
Posted by Axel At 07:59:34 AM On 05/11/2009 |
Posted by Nathan T. Freeman At 10:26:52 AM On 05/11/2009 |
Posted by Charles Robinson At 01:08:45 PM On 05/11/2009 |
We're going through our Microsoft licensing now that we've moved to a fully virtualized server environment. I'll have to do a comparison with the IBM/Lotus numbers just to see how they stack up.
Posted by Charles Robinson At 01:55:50 PM On 05/11/2009 |
Posted by Gerry Shappell At 12:37:26 PM On 05/12/2009 |
Posted by Bilal Jaffery At 04:55:57 PM On 05/12/2009 |
and great read for me--useful to keep in touch w/the lotus space. (just don't have time to peruse everything)
U & Eric are hugely valuable to IBM for PR purposes...
btw, you should implement Facebook connect on this blog...
Posted by Jeff Widman At 07:40:49 PM On 05/13/2009 |