IBM released more info about their cloud offerings during Lotusphere 2011 (#ls11 on Twitter). Already during the opening session it was revealed that Project Concord, the online collaboration document editing that was shown at last years conference, was now a full product called LotusLive Symphony. Another product unveiled this week is LotusLive BES, a hosted Blackberry Enterprise Server offering that works together with the email in LotusLive.
– This will allow a small company to get email, mobile support and much more without the need to purchase hardware, install the software, provision users and hire someone to maintain and administer the server, Brendan Crotty at IBM explained to me.
– LotusLive is not intended to rip-and-replace, we think that most customers will use a hybrid model, he continued. There is a LotusLive Connections offering, currently supporting Profiles, Activities and (most recently added) Communities. The products are designed for a hybrid model.
Uffe Sorensen, responsible for social business in EMEA, echo this. He point out that Xpages was developed to bring most of the functionality of the rich client to the web.
– Now you can do almost everything you do in the Notes client on the web as well, he said.
– Domino powers an incredible amount of applications, and we can’t demand them to be thrown out, so a hybrid model is important.
LotusLive Notes lets customers host their Notes applications in the cloud, but they still use the Notes client. By rewriting the applications, or parts of them, they can be deployed as web applications as well.
So IBM is getting a more and more complete cloud offering, with options to run hybrid models if the customer wants to. Personally I think IBM is on the right way, and they have a solid offering. Imagine a new company going to ibm.com, selecting the services they need and then paying online with a credit card, and moments later they have the tools they need, without having to purchase hardware, software or services for an on-premises solution.
