Lotusphere 2011: INV105, Messaging and Collaboration Strategy
February 1 2011
I've never been in the Lotusphere opening general session and don't have any plans to anytime soon. The senior execs take the stage, the product managers do the demos. Middle management -- we sit up front and shake hands, and for several years I've also done the blog and tweet thing. That's good enough for me. In fact, I don't watch rehearsals, I don't ask who the guest speaker will be, and I -- like you -- am generally seeing things for the first time in that session. A ton of work goes into it -- Chris Reckling has been blogging about what the OGS team does, for months before the conference -- and I have much respect for what they accomplish.
In previous Lotuspheres, I've presented breakout sessions from the main stage. At Lotusphere 2010, Kevin Cavanaugh and I did the messaging and collaboration strategy session together. There were two key differences this year -- the room divider about halfway back was not up, meaning there were 2000+ mostly-filled seats in one room, and Kevin is in a new role. Yesterday, walking out on that stage alone, despite all my professional speaking experience, was a bit intimidating. Oddly, in some ways I was more nervous about the session after it was done, because I was able to find out through Twitter, blogs, and hallway conversations who was in my audience. Press, analysts, friends, senior executives from IBM, competitors. It was actually much easier to just look out at a sea of humanity than it was to think about those individuals whilst on stage.
I felt the session went well. We came in at exactly 60 minutes, though with the late start that meant running over time and a few people had to leave early. With the big room, it was hard to gauge reactions. What I was told throughout the afternoon was that you all were paying attention. I did from time to time see a heck of a lot of cameras pointed at the big screen, so some of what we were talking about must have been interesting or relevant. I heard applause and shouts. I saw the blogger den busily writing. And I heard the laughter as I squinted at monitors that seemed stuck in the display mode that would work for slides designed for the 100 foot big screen, not a 16:9 ratio.
All the comments on Twitter about content and attitude were most appreciated. Regarding the teleprompter, it wasn't an option, even if I had wanted it -- which I didn't. I was confident in the content of the session, though I left out two things. One I'm going to save for later in the week -- you won't leave Orlando without hearing it -- and the other was added into a different session. Unscripted, I hit 95% of my objectives.
I think the format of bringing up business partners as punctuation to specific chapters worked. I'm not a panel discussion guy, and I felt like my team has enough stage time in their own sessions that you didn't need to see them in the INV105 setting. These business partners -- Marc Gingras of Tungle, Eddie Hasicka of Synaptris, Nathan Freeman of GBS, and Eileen Fitzgerald of GSX -- exemplify to me the community and passion that has been the core of the Notes/Domino community for well more than a decade. It was a privilege and an honor to have the opportunity to invite them -- friends and colleagues -- to the stage. And to the cynics, no, GBS's sponsorship had nothing to do with Nathan being there--it was important for me to highlight their XPages modernization approach, and I would have done it if it was from Bobs-your-uncle consulting.
So here are the slides. I've even flagged them as available for download from slideshare. We don't often post Lotusphere segment strategy presentations as available, but you all need this content in your daily work. I'm happy to take questions here, or you can save them for Thursday's Ask the Product Managers session. Once again, thanks for attending, for your feedback and support, and for your friendship. Being center stage is not a responsibility I took lightly -- and you made it all worth it.
Post a Comment
- 2
Peter Meuser http://itlab.de | 2/1/2011 10:52:07 AM
Ed, so far I see a lot of "promises" in your presentation. Hopefully IBM will make them happen fast enough. Especially I hope, that the platform will still be able to deliver the best RADD tools to support business workflows in the age of Enterprise 2.0. The disappointment of "composite applications" indroduced with Notes 8 that never really happen (as advertised) impact IBM's credit.
What I miss so far: A better Citrix support is not mentioned with one word. Ok, Citrix will be legacy in the world of a fully web based Enterprise 2.0, but not supporting it today the right way closes a lot of doors before this new age will arrive in the daily business. The outlook "Areas of Continual Evaluation - Increased interest in virtualized clients" in ID201 does not appreciate this problem area.
Peter
- 4
Peter Meuser http://itlab.de | 2/1/2011 11:16:58 AM
That's the point: Citrix support is not strategic ;-)
- 5
Peter Meuser http://itlab.de | 2/1/2011 11:27:59 AM
XPiNC is - indeed - a nice idea, but seems to be at least today very limited for realworld tasks.
Concerns about the speed of Xpages in the client ( XPiNC) - please comment:
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Gregg Eldred http://www.ns-tech.com/blog/geldred.nsf | 2/1/2011 2:50:15 PM
"Bob's your uncle." LOL! A few years ago, I pinged a colleague in the UK to explain that phrase to me. I think we, in the US, need a phrase like that.
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Norm Van Bergen | 2/1/2011 4:08:49 PM
@6 -- "Bob's your uncle" is also common here in Canada as well.
P.S. Here's the obligatory 'eh' required by the CRTC.
- 8
mus | 2/2/2011 7:26:41 AM
I've been following all the announcements and I have to say I find it all quite depressing. The focus is clearly shifting from internal Domino environments to externally hosted environments. Whilst I understand that revenue stream must be very welcome for IBM, for me as I Domino Administrator I find the idea depressing.
Anyway that's just my opinion.
- 9
Collin Murray http://www-01.ibm.com/software/lotus/products/domino/ | 2/2/2011 4:44:47 PM
@8 Hopefully you attended one of my ID101 sessions about Domino,Now & Futures (I realize the first one was overflowing & they turned people away...). Domino is a key component of our messaging & collaboration strategy , we continue to invest heavily in Domino on-prem and in the cloud. We have numerous customers that have no plans to move to a hosted solution, we remain committed to their success in addition to hosted customers. Our support of a hybrid solution also underscores our investment in Domino on-prem. Anyway, check out the ID101 slides once they're posted.
- 10
Bob Balaban http://www.bobzblog.com | 2/2/2011 7:53:54 PM
I read the slides, but did not attend the session, so I may have a skewed perception. Lots of great content, but if I may say so, it seemed a lot more "roadmap" and not much "strategy" at all.
A couple of strategy questions I would have liked to see addressed:
- How will you win back market share from Microsoft?
- How will you counter the appeal of free GMail/GApps to many CIOs?
- How will you (indeed, will you?) combine your messaging assets with your application platform assets to win in both areas?
- 12
Peter Meuser http://itlab.de | 2/5/2011 3:27:03 PM
Where is comment 12 gone? I can only see 11.
- 14
Tony Rorai | 2/7/2011 1:19:57 PM
@9 Great session. One thing that I'll be keeping an eye on is the steps IBM will take to keep LotusLive and on-prem solutions from diverging into completely seperate products.
Thanks for putting up the presentation slides, Ed :-)