Good morning from Orlando. It's always disorienting to be in these hotels when it's not Lotusphere. Today at the Dolphin, some sales meeting is wrapping up. The attendees do not seem demographically to match Lotusphere...
...but that will all start changing today. And in 24-36 hours, I know I'll be in the zone, with thousands of my closest friends and colleagues.
There is a lot of exciting news and innovation coming in the next week at Lotusphere and IBM Connect 2012. Obviously I'm not here to write the spoilers blog. What I do want to do is address a word I have heard frequently in the last few days, and that's "Vulcan". Specifically, IBM Project Vulcan, which we announced as a blueprint previously at Lotusphere. It seems, from the topics I've been given for some of my 1:1 meetings next week, that many are looking for us to answer the question of "what have you done with Vulcan?" or "when can I buy Vulcan?" or "is Leonard Nimoy the guest speaker?" (I have no idea about the last one, I never find out in advance).
I have often said in these pages that "branding is the hardest part of marketing." What has always struck me as funny is how our codenames, often never intended to be externally visible, become so successful--disproportionately so. When I say Domino, or Hannover, or Bluejay, or Shimmer...many of you recognize these codenames, one of which even eventually became the product name. This was always the risk with "IBM Project Vulcan", is that within a short period of time, we started getting questions of "when is Vulcan shipping?" "What product does Vulcan replace?" In the end, a codename can create confusion, as much as it creates a unifying concept or theme.
So, at Lotusphere 2012, where is IBM Project Vulcan? The answer: It's everywhere. It's in Notes/Domino "Next". It's in Connections "Next". It's in LotusLive "Next". It's in LotusLive Symphony. It's in the Social Business Toolkit. The concepts we laid out for Project Vulcan -- convergence, integration, innovation, opportunity -- have been applied and baked into the new versions of these products, all of which will be prominently featured (and heavily demonstrated!) in the Lotusphere Opening General Session. The blueprint has become its real thing, something you can and will deploy in 2012, almost regardless of your entry point into IBM Collaboration Solutions.
You probably won't hear the word "Vulcan" much anymore, though. It's time to stop talking about a conceptual blueprint and start talking about the implementation. The impressive aspect of that blueprint is that it established a long-term view of how to evolve our solutions to be the best-in-class social business tools. This year's releases, and even those beyond, will show the strength of that vision. We have taken to heart that "IBM Project Vulcan" will live long within IBM's social business solutions, and prosper.
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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