CAN04R

I D C V E N D O R S P O T L I G H T

Lotus Blooms in 2009 May, 2009 Nigel Wallis

Introduction

Recent IDC research shows that the top Canadian organizational priority in 2009 is improving efficiency. This is of little surprise given the current economic climate. The ways in which companies achieve this goal will not only impact their ability to survive the current challenges, but also their ability to generate revenue when the economy recovers.

Canadian business and technology decision-makers have invested in collaborative applications to improve efficiencies, which should result in organizational cost savings (see Figure 1). While improved customer experience was not a significant driver of adoption, IDC's research highlights that collaborative solutions can support revenue growth through increased customer satisfaction (see Figure 2).

F I G U R E 1

B u s i n e s s D r i v e r s f o r I m p r o v i n g C o l l a b o r a t i o n T e c h n o l o g y

0 20 40 60 80 100

Other

Mitigated risks

Retain valuable employees

ROI for technology purposes

Reduce total cost of ownership

Gain competitive advantage

Redeploy IT staff for higher priority projects

Work in locations outside office

Increased revenues

Improve customer satisfaction

Allow employees to make more timely decisions

Improved efficiency

Percentage

N = 122

Source: IDC, 2008

©2009 IDC 2

There is growing market awareness of the need for and value of collaboration driven by changing employee demographics and their adoption of applications such as Facebook, Twitter or Myspace. Established companies such as Proctor & Gamble, as well as newer market entrants such as Zappos, an online apparel and shoe retailer, are improving efficiencies and creating competitive advantage by leveraging collaborative technology. IDC research shows that 26% of Canadian companies have already adopted some form of social networking solution. The growing adoption of collaborative and social networking applications is reflected in IDC's Canadian forecast. This software market segment is expected to grow to $205.6 million by 2013 from $185 million in 2009.

Collaborative Applications  

IDC describes collaborative applications, including social networking software, as applications and/or processes that allow the sharing, authoring, editing, and publishing of content by both internal/external partners and contacts. Content and document management applications, mashups, wikis, portals (both intranet and extranet portals), search solutions, telepresence, video messaging, and Web conferencing are adjacent solutions that are increasingly being delivered as features within broader collaborative solutions.

Benefits

IDC's 2009 research concluded that the three biggest benefits of adding social networking applications to enterprises are: (1) Improving departmental cooperation/collaboration between employees; (2) Improving customer interactions; and (3) Improving productivity (see Figure 2). Over time, we believe talent management — the recruiting and retaining of talented younger employees who are habituated to these technologies — will be an increasingly important driver for organizational investment.

IDC believes that there are additional benefits to using collaborative software. These include:

• Extended reach of the enterprise — New technologies connect staff, partners, suppliers and customers quickly and easily. The resulting improvement in communication has the potential to improve the relationship through better efficiency and revenue opportunities.

• Decreased time to market — These solutions facilitate the feedback process by capturing and creating new knowledge capital as well as intellectual property.

• Improved compliance with regulatory standards — Content management applications make organizational content easier to find and manage, allowing companies to improve compliance with ever-evolving internal standards and external regulations.

©2009 IDC 3

F I G U R E 2

P r i m a r y B e n e f i t s o f I n v e s t i n g i n S o c i a l N e t w o r k i n g / W e b 2 . 0 S o f t w a r e

0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100

None

Other, please specify

Reduce risks ( fines, penalties, work related accidents)

Automating business process/workflow

Improved brand image/public relations

Gain competitive advantage

Reduce cost of business operations

Allow employees to make more timely decisions

Improve employee morale/satisfaction

Improve productivity

Improve customer interactions

Improve departmental co-operation/Collaboration

N = 200 Source: IDC, 2009

Challenges and Opportunities

In order to fully realize the benefits of collaborative applications, IDC believes that organizations will have to develop new policies and procedures around the way in which information is "owned", "managed", and disseminated. Furthermore, expectations of collaboration, commerce, and innovation among younger workers will promote collaboration and social networking in the workplace. The demographic just entering the workforce has already grown up with collaborative technologies and social media in their personal lives and expects to find similar capabilities in the workplace. They desire the personalization of their work and typically have a richer, more dynamic and interactive, experience with technology outside of work. These factors make it essential that technology departments respond to the latent need/desire for improved communications channels.

In today's economy, there is a higher return on investment/total cost of ownership hurdle that organizations must exceed in order to gain approval for new expenditures. This may create an issue for the adoption of collaborative applications — particularly social networking applications in which the benefits tend to be "softer" and more difficult to measure. Organizations should leverage case studies and technology vendors to assist in the quantifications of benefits relative to these products.

©2009 IDC 4

IDC expects the vendor landscape to change, potentially dramatically, in the collaborative application market. New entrants and mergers and acquisitions, as well as the evolution of adjacent technologies, such as unified communications and mobility, may make it more challenging for organizations to identify the right solution for their business. CIOs and other key decision-makers need to consider the stability of their chosen vendors as an additional criterion in their decision making.

Lotus: IBM's Collaboration Application Portfolio

Lotus has a rich tradition, so much so that there are times when the popular perception of that history obscures our understanding of the collaboration technology's actual evolution. In many ways, Notes established the groupware technology, which has broadened into the wider collaboration market today. Lotus has steadily responded to these changes by investing in solutions to the increasingly complex requirements of enterprise customers. IBM now has over 50,000 Lotus Notes customers worldwide (or more than 145 million users). For example, organizations are faced with increasingly complicated compliance requirements and steadily increasing network bandwidth requirements. As a result, Lotus introduced "policy-based system administration" and network compression followed by "Activity Trends" to alleviate these pain points. Likewise, as businesses began to see the benefits of real-time collaboration, version 6.5 saw the integration of Sametime, the instant messaging technology within the Notes client. Lotus' belief in integration reaches beyond the collaboration portfolio. Lotus Notes is released on an Eclipse framework, the multilanguage development platform, making Lotus Notes an open-source, Java-based platform.

IBM's commitment to research and development (R&D) is impressive. In 2008, IBM invested $6 billion in research, or nearly 6% of revenue. According to VP of UC Strategy Bruce Morse in CRN.com, IBM is planning to spend $1.0 billion over the next three years on its unified communications and collaborative strategy. Alistair Rennie, VP of development for Lotus Software, reinforced IBM's commitment to Notes in a recent interview, stating: "Our strategy is to remain open and social. We will continue to deliver innovation by offering product cycles of 12–18 months. Our openness allows multiple databases, operating systems, and API connections that translates downstream to mobile devices." Moreover, recent partnerships and product refinements such as SAP and the Alloy product, RIM for its mobile strategy, Skype for voice and video within Sametime, and Salesforce.com and Linkedin for their social networking aspects, demonstrate IBM's commitment to the Lotus Collaboration suite.

The solution is offered in a variety of delivery models, including on-premises client/server, hosted (whereby the client owns the application and IBM hosts it), as an appliance or through software as a service (SaaS). These options enable customers the choice of installation, depending on preferences around size, cost, security, etc. As a result, Lotus can be used by organizations of all sizes (see Figure 3).

©2009 IDC 5

F I G U R E 3

L o t u s : I B M ' s C o l l a b o r a t i o n A p p l i c a t i o n P o r t f o l i o

Hos

ted

On-

Pre

mis

e

Saa

S

App

lianc

e

Unified Commsand Collaboration

Portals and Mashups

Messaging and Collaboration Social Software

Hos

ted

On-

Pre

mis

e

Saa

S

App

lianc

e

Unified Commsand Collaboration

Portals and Mashups

Messaging and Collaboration Social Software

Source: IBM, 2009

Messaging, Collaboration, and Unified Communications

IBM's messaging, collaboration, and unified communications offerings continue to evolve to meet market demand and take advantage of advances in technology.

• Domino — The server-based application that provides a platform for email, messaging, collaboration, workflow and custom applications. While core services include email server, applications server, Web server, database server, and directory server, add-ins include data integration, instant messaging and web conferencing, document management, collaboration space, mobile application server, and mobile "push" synchronization to handheld devices. Domino has a built-in document-oriented database system but can also use IBM DB2. The Lotus Designer is an application development tool that supports many languages and integration with Tivoli, AIX, and Linux so that organizations can build applications quickly.

• XPages — This is aimed at developers, allowing them to create Web pages within Domino. XPages provides design notes for forms and views, and data notes for documents. Items are uniquely defined to a note and do not need to match a pre-written schema or table structure. This functionality also extends to mobile platforms such as BlackBerry devices.

• Lotus Notes — While popularly thought of as the email client, Lotus Notes is really the user interface uniting the collaboration and communications tools, including messaging, calendaring, instant messaging, VoIP, and both Domino and non-Domino applications. Based on the Eclipse framework, the desktop is highly extensible and adaptable to individual needs. A key differentiator for enterprise is the additional security needed for auditing and compliance standards so documents and email can only be removed from current folders and not the system. Additional features include personalized views, text recognition that preserves formatting, the use of tabbed style formats for documents and email similar to those found in Web browsers and portals, and cross-document functionality.

©2009 IDC 6

• Sametime — This is the instant messaging and conferencing component of the suite. Like Lotus Notes, the Sametime client is built on the Eclipse framework, allowing for a more customizable user experience while additionally allowing organizations to embed business processes and other collaboration tools into the interface. The user interface is more user-friendly, having added drag and drop functionality for names and calendar events to the Sametime client.

• Lotus Quickr — IBM Lotus Quickr is a team collaboration offering enabling easier sharing of everyday business content, such as documents and rich media among virtual teams. Lotus Quickr's features are: (1) Content repositories — in which users store personal and team content; (2) Content and team services — how one organizes, accesses, and shares content and team projects, and (3) Connectors — Lotus Quickr connectors are plug-ins that snap into desktop applications like Lotus Notes, Microsoft Office, Outlook, or Explorer. The connectors let end users work in their familiar desktop applications and move content from Notes and Outlook, Sametime, and Office applications directly into Lotus Quickr. Quickr is also integrated with ECM offerings, allowing users to collaborate on business content via Quickr while leveraging IBM's enterprise content management infrastructure.

• Symphony — This is a free application suite for the creation and editing of documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. Symphony supports open document formats (ODF), Microsoft Office and Lotus SmartSuite formats on Linux, and Windows or Apple OS X operating systems in over 23 languages.

Each of these applications may be run independently or as part of the Collaboration suite. Lotus is a full featured, integrated and open solution to be considered as organizations evolve their collaborative and unified communications strategies. Notes and Domino provide a pragmatic approach for enterprises with mixed environments.

Social Networking

IBM Lotus Connections is the social networking application that captures the power of social networking and brings it to the workplace. Lotus Connections has six integrated core modules that allow social networking activities to be integrated into a business' existing infrastructure and business processes.

• Homepage: This tool allows a user to create a single customized view of their content, including email, documents, workflows, etc., and access social networking tools.

• Profiles. This tool allows employees to search and locate key resources through search terms beyond name or title. Lotus Connections effectively "tags" human capital, allowing for contextual searches, which then encourages person-to-person communication through core Notes features such as email and IM. This reduces the time squandered on locating internal subject matter and increases organizational efficiency, along with other benefits around understanding how the social capital in a firm truly works — in contrast to the top-down, organizational structure schematics.

• Communities: This tool is aimed at bringing together those people within an organization who share common responsibilities, expertise, or interest matter. It is aimed at creating a secure internal space for creating and sharing communities of knowledge.

• Blogs. The blogs tool in Lotus Connections allows the creation of a secure internal location for presenting new learning and opinions, while opening lines of communication for feedback.

• Dogear. This feature allows users to save key URLs in order to recall information — similar to the standard browser bookmarking or favourites feature. Moreover, it encourages the internal sharing of URLs, akin to Del.icio.us or other consumer-oriented services.

• Activities. This component of Lotus Connections pulls together the varied components of day to day business tasks, placing all related structured and unstructured data in an easily accessible location, from spreadsheets to PowerPoints, chat transcripts to bookmarks, sales data to marketing collateral, etc. All of these may reside in different places, but Activities congregates these data points, from ad hoc communication channels through to siloed data repositories such as ERP systems into a single,

©2009 IDC 7

shareable location. This enables information workers to see what data is present and up to date in a logical, chronological fashion, rather than chase through each silo.

Lotus Connections aims to bring the advantages of social networking technologies to a secure, enterprise grade solution that meets the needs of today's information workers. Lotus has planned and announced the expansion of its social networking functionalities, with the release in 3Q09 of Lotus Connections 2.5, which will include wikis and file sharing. A key advantage of the Lotus Connections platform is that any one or all of the Lotus Connections services can be integrated into an organization's existing systems allowing them to weave social computing easily into their existing business processes. Lotus Connections can also be accessed through browser interfaces or through applications such as IBM Lotus Notes, IBM Lotus Sametime, IBM WebSphere Portal, and Microsoft Office, Lotus Quickr, and MS Outlook.

F I G U R E 4

L o t u s C o n n e c t i o n s H o m e P a g e

Source: IBM, 2009

©2009 IDC 8

SaaS — Delivery Models

In January 2009, IBM released LotusLive as a cloud-based portfolio of collaboration products including email, hosted online voice and video meetings, data visualization, and file sharing. LotusLive can be deployed by enterprises of all sizes, with lower upfront technology and staffing requirements, given its cloud-based, open Web standards-based, software as a service (SaaS) model.

Among the advantages of the SaaS delivery model is the reduced time to value through lower upfront costs — the result of lowered new hardware requirements and pricing models that allow for monthly subscriptions on a per-seat basis, allowing for rapid scaling up or down. Additionally, the quality of service SLAs attached to enterprise-class SaaS models often exceed those delivered on by internal IT departments. This helps alleviate concerns around security and data quality. Lastly, SaaS also allows for reduced time between iterations as patches and updates can be propagated to all users across the system with reduced requirements for testing (as the vendor controls all the variables) instead of testing across multiple hardware and software environments.

The LotusLive portfolio includes Web conferencing, collaboration, and email applications.

• Web Conferencing — The Web conferencing application includes Sametime Unyte Meetings and Sametime Events.

o Sametime Unyte — Sametime Unyte can support up to 999 users and offers application and file sharing as well as voice and video capabilities. Additional services such as recording, polling, calendaring and remote control can be added to enhance the Web conferencing application.

o Sametime Events — The Events application offers Internet-based tools that manage and create Webinars. Organizations can use SSL encryption, invitation templates, email follow up, and other tools to create online presentations as well as monitor and control the administration and technical functions of a Webinar.

• Collaboration — The collaboration module provides tools for creation and inclusion of features for a social network. Features include instant messaging, file sharing, survey creation, and data visualization.

LotusLive Engage — A secure, integrated suite of Web collaboration and business including solutions such as online meeting service, store and share capabilities, and instant messaging. For file sharing, as opposed to Web meetings.

LotusLive Connections — A collaboration environment that includes profiles, activities, forms, store and share capabilities, and instant messaging.

o Messaging — The email module includes Lotus Notes and iNotes. Lotus iNotes is a Web application service that enables the exchange of emails and files and is capable of real-time email synchronization. iNotes offers organizations the option to source email and corresponding services such as storage, administration, or hardware as a service.

The combination of services available in LotusLive can enable organizations to leverage existing infrastructure investments while adding new functionality. Any element of the LotusLive suite may be delivered as standalone or hosted entirely.

©2009 IDC 9

Collaboration Solution Selection Criteria

Integration with existing applications is the primary selection criteria for collaborative solutions (see Figure 5). As previously stated, Lotus is an integrated and open solution that should be considered as organizations evolve their collaborative and unified communications strategies.

F I G U R E 5

P r i m a r y S e l e c t i o n C r i t e r i o n — C o l l a b o r a t i v e S o f t w a r e

0 10 20 30 40 50

Other

Ease of reporting functions

Product road map meets future needs

Technical support

Cost of software licence & maintenance

Established relationship with vendor

Vendor's knowledge or expertise

Industry-specific application

Workflow & business process automation

Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)

Track record

Align w/ business objectives

Integrating w/ your org's existing apps

Integration w/ Office Productivity & Email

Large

Medium

N = 122

Source: IDC, 2008

IDC believes that usability is an often overlooked but critical selection criterion. Usability is also tied to the integration of collaboration and social computing services into the organization's underlying business processes. By definition, the success of a collaboration solution will be found through its widespread use among employees. IT departments and LOB executives often focus on technical requirements and business process aspects, to the detriment of the user interface. IDC believes that each leg of the people, process, and technology triangle is equally important for the success of the implementation. To that end, IDC recommends involving alpha and beta users throughout the selection process.

©2009 IDC 10

A B O U T T H I S P U B L I C A T I O N

This publication was produced by IDC Go-to-Market Services. The opinion, analysis, and research results presented herein are drawn from more detailed research and analysis independently conducted and published by IDC, unless specific vendor sponsorship is noted. IDC Go-to-Market Services makes IDC content available in a wide range of formats for distribution by various companies. A license to distribute IDC content does not imply endorsement of or opinion about the licensee.

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