The 2nd Australian Lotus User Group (AusLUG) has just come to a close. Over 300 attendees participated in 58 breakout sessions across the two days here in Melbourne. It was a fantastic event, and my congratulations to the organizing committee, lead by Mat Newman, for the event's overall success.
It seemed like about half the attendees had participated in the Sydney event last August. It also seemed like there were more developers than admins, along with a whole bunch of IT management, architects, and partners. Yesterday, my colleagues Ted Stanton, Stuart Duguid, and myself delivered a keynote on why social business matters; we featured customer stories from the Australian Bureau of Statistics among others. Also over from the US was Andrew Davis, who presented on Notes Social Edition and embedded experiences, a session that was educational for me and my IBM colleagues as well as the attendees. New Zealand's Michael Sampson day-tripped over to present about how to apply the principles of social business to an IBM Connections deployment; he also participated in the Nerd Girls Sparks session during Thursday's lunch.
The IBM team again delivered on an impressive set of technical demonstrations on-site, including early code such as the Notes browser plug-in. About twenty business partners were also exhibiting.
I'd like to overshare a bit of an important observation in terms of where the "Lotus" market is going.
Several years ago, we would participate in conferences -- and even our own Lotusphere -- and any attempt to expand the aperture to include the other IBM collaboration solutions was met with limited success or even resistance. We within IBM collectively wondered whether the yellowverse would embrace new solutions in the portal, unified communication, social networking, and other markets, or whether IBM would simply have to develop those market opportunities independent of the installed base of Notes customers.
In the last year, and specifically at events like this, some of the LCTYs I participated in in Germany last month, last week's successful Belgian Lotus User Group (congrats to Theo Heselmans and team), and others, I see a dramatic turn of events. Michael Sampson's session yesterday on user adoption for IBM Connections was packed -- almost every seat taken. Chris Miller ran a session titled "From Domino Admin to WebSphere Admin - in an hour". Mikkel Heisterberg talked about creating widgets for IBM Connections. Gabriella Davis presented system designs for Sametime.
Why is this important? Because there is recognition amongst you as customers and partners that success in the era of social business means more than just working with Notes and Domino, and that IBM solutions -- Connections, current versions of Sametime, IBM Forms, SmartCloud Social, etc -- provide you new opportunities to grow your skills if you are in IT or your business if you are a partner. And that is good for the entire market, as well as for IBM's investment decisions in sponsorship for events like AusLUG. You all are willing to adapt, grow, taken on new skills, and most importantly (as evidenced by the attendance at Sampson's session) -- be the champions for change and adoption in your organization.
As the vendor, I want to thank you the community for placing your bets on us at IBM and on our collective future together. It is an incredible validation of everything we are doing to come to an event like this and have you be so excited and ready to deploy and adopt and build across XPages and Open Social and Traveler and Connections Next and SUT and all of it. I hope the 300 of you who were along for the ride this week in sunny Melbourne feel as fortunate as I do to be part of the market and where social business is headed -- built on the foundation and investments we have all created together.
Several European IBM MobileFirst events upcoming, my first tour
Fri, May 17th 2013 5:30a Ed Brill About a hundred days since the launch of IBM MobileFirst, we are still pretty busy creating market awareness of IBM's leadership in enterprise mobility. Thus, there are a huge number of events upcoming, including a number of them in Europe. I will be at the Utrecht and Madrid events. June 4, Utrecht Netherlands: IBM SolutionsConnect. June 5, Vienna Austria: IBM BusinessConnect. June 6, Madrid Spain: Encuentro en IBM MobileFirst. Tengo muchas ganas de volver a Madrid. ¿Nos encontrarem [read] Keywords: ibm
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Forrester Total Economic Impact of IBM Worklight: 363% five-year ROI
Wed, May 15th 2013 5:20a Ed Brill Earlier this month, Forrester released a new Total Economic Impact study, "The Total Economic Impact Of IBM’s Worklight Platform: Cost Savings In The Development And Maintenance Of Multiplatform Mobile Apps." The study shows that the cost of creating and managing a single multi-platform app is significantly less expensive when using IBM Worklight than when using native tools alone. From the study:The cost of developing and maintaining apps increases with the number of platforms suppor [read] Keywords: ibm
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CRN: Solution Provider Perficient Launches Mobile Computing Practice
Thu, May 2nd 2013 9:50a Ed Brill Part of my role in IBM MobileFirst is developing an ecosystem of partners around IBM's market-leading enterprise mobility solutions. This week at IBM Impact, I met dozens of partners who are entering or fully into the mobile market, on the second wave of mobile. One common question is, what's different now? Mobile has been around for years. The answer is that the market is maturing rapidly, and now is the time for organizations to adopt a mobile strategy, rather than just a series of tac [read] Keywords: ibm
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News from IBM Impact 2013
Mon, Apr 29th 2013 12:20p Ed Brill This morning at Impact 2013, IBM has announced several updates to our MobileFirst initiative. The first is the announcement of IBM MessageSight, a high-volume transactional message delivery appliance, designed to enable/accelerate M2M (machine-to-machine) communications for the Internet of Things. Here at Impact, as discussed in a recent New York Times article, one of the key examples of how MessageSight manifests is in the connected car. In the Focus Electric car, he said, Ford wants to get [read] Keywords: ibm
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Three topics in mobile that come up in conversations so far
Wed, Apr 24th 2013 9:56a Ed Brill Next week will mark three months in for my new role as head of market management for IBM MobileFirst. As mentioned yesterday, I'll spend that 90th day among thousands of IBM clients, partners, and employees at Impact 2013. I realize I have not been blogging as much about the topics that are part of my every day conversations in this role. Thus, with the conference at hand, it seemed timely to start to share. Here are some enterprise mobility topics that I expect to be talking a lot about dur [read] Keywords: ibm
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IBM MobileFirst sessions at Impact 2013
Tue, Apr 23rd 2013 12:50p Ed Brill In three days, I will be on a plane to Las Vegas, for a bigger-than-Lotusphere-sized IBM conference, IBM Impact. IBM MobileFirst will be out in full force at Impact, with over 100 mobile-focused sessions on the agenda. The list below are just some of those sessions, which hopefully provides an idea of the level of focus on this category and market. In addition to sessions, there are a lot of other IBM MobileFirst activities: - A hackathon - An unconference - Exhibitions - Workshops [read] Keywords: ibm
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Book review: Attack of the Customers by Paul Gillin
Wed, Apr 17th 2013 5:50a Ed Brill Nothing like meeting someone in person as a catalyst to finish reading their book :-) I'm in Austin today, where I will be working with longtime industry figure Paul Gillin on a webcast tomorrow morning. The topic is BYOD (Bring Your Own Device), and it is hosted by Spiceworks.com. Please join us if you'd like to talk about IBM MobileFirst management and IBM's solutions in this space such as Endpoint Manager for mobile devices. Recently, Paul graciously took the time to read and revie [read] Keywords: connections
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IBM X-Force 2012 Trend and Risk Report
Wed, Apr 3rd 2013 8:06a Ed Brill Last week, IBM published the latest in its series of security threat assessment reports, the IBM X-Force® 2012 Trend and Risk Report. Mobile is clearly a place where emerging threats need attention; products like IBM AppScan are designed to meet this challenge head-on. The report is notable for some of the predictions around the mobile space, including: Prediction: Mobile computing devices should be more secure than traditional user computing devices by 2014. This is a bold prediction t [read] Keywords: ibm
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BLUG and IBM MobileFirst debrief
Mon, Apr 1st 2013 7:54a Ed Brill A little over a week ago, I had the good fortune to be in Europe during the 2013 edition of BLUG. I caught the morning train from Paris to Brussels, a quick connection from there to Leuven, and after a short taxi ride arrived just in time for lunch in a UNESCO World Heritage site, the Faculty Club. Why was I there? Scott Souder is doing a perfectly awesome job as the new public face of IBM Notes/Domino, so that wasn't it. IBM Notes/Domino 9 Social Edition had shipped the day before, so the [read] Keywords: domino
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Social Media Club of Chicago, March 25 meeting recap
Wed, Mar 27th 2013 8:10a Ed Brill First of two event recap blog entries...the other will be shortly about last week's BLUG event. Last night, I had the opportunity to be part of a panel discussion at the Social Media Club of Chicago. The topic happened to be "What Happened at South by Southwest", and it happened to be that IBM exhibited/sponsored/participated at SXSWi in a big way. But it also happened to be my first opportunity to participate with the Chicago edition of Social Media Club, and I was honored to be part of [read] Keywords: ibm
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