IBM LotusLive Gets Another Update & Collaboration Niche Players Emerge
Enterprise collaboration is going to be a burgeoning market this year, thanks in no small part to the gauntlet thrown by IBM and their LotusLive collaboration suite. IBM has dedicated much attention to the Lotus line, catalyzing the demand for enterprise collaboration software and IBM’s position as a market leader. There are some other major players in the collaboration game, of course. Just last month, Salesforce.com’s CEO touted his “Facebook Imperative,” and the company assailed Microsoft SharePoint as a less appealing collaboration product in comparison to Salesforce Chatter.
The collaboration software market isn’t new, but it is growing, and so each software giant is marketing their respective collaboration suites as sort of niche products. Salesforce Chatter is marked by its social network-like features, MS SharePoint is established as one of the original collaboration services, and LotusLive, well, LotusLive is being characterized by proliferation. In January, IBM announced a deal with Panasonic that could potentially advance the Lotus suite, and this week they announced improvements to both LotusLive and Lotus Foundations.
LotusLive and Lotus Foundations are the cloud-based and on-premise editions of the Lotus line, respectively. Yesterday, it was announced that Lotus Foundations would be packaged with a DB-2 Express database, and there are no limits on database size of the number of databases per server. The additional database will allow Lotus Foundation users to leverage vertical-specific applications from the platform.
We’re interested to see which collaboration suites take the torch this year. IBM has a solid bet with the Lotus line—as the ability to offer a hybrid platform will give them a leg up in the enterprise—but only time will tell.
[Photo courtesy of willis.]
