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IBM's eMail endgame plan

When IBM announced Project Vulcan last year is was a not so specific vision of the future of collaboration. With the announcement of the IBM Social Business Toolkit at Lotusphere 2011, that vision got its technical underpinning: it is based on a number of open standards like OpenSocial, ActivityStreams, AtomPub and others. But hidden in the Press release is IBM's eMail end game plan. While the Notes R8.x mail client was a big step forward there is still that perception (I'm not discussing the validity of that perception here!) that MS-Outlook is the better mail client. I stated before: "Exchange mail servers are the collateral damage of users wanting Outlook", (Again: I'm not judging that "want"), just compare deployment diagrams. So what would happen if Outlook is out of the picture:

1. Customer deploys the new Vulcan platform (whatever it will be called) on premise, in the cloud or in a hybrid model
2. Collaboration improves dramatically using IBM Activities and the integration of Activity streams from SAP and other line of business applications
3. eMail notifications are replaced by Activity streams
4. Whatever email (Notes, Exchange) surfaces as Social Mail in the new UI. Traditional eMail clients become ghosts of Christmas past
5. Office documents are moved to LotusLive Symphony (There is no reason why it needs to stay a cloud only solution) or other browser based editors
6. Suddenly eMail becomes a "backend only" decision since the UI doesn't change when you swap your server. And in backends IBM has really big boxes that are very efficient.

I wonder if that works? (Keep in mind: IBM's plays are large enterprise plays, SMB always has been an afterthought)

Posted by Stephan H Wissel On 01/04/2011, Category Software | Permalink | Share

Comments

1 - /me checks the date on this post. Yeah, now it makes sense.

Posted by Nathan T. Freeman At 22:58:49 On 04/01/2011 | - Website - |

2 - @Nathan: Wrong guess!

Posted by Stephan H. Wissel At 23:08:20 On 04/01/2011 | - Website - |

3 - "I wonder if that works? (Keep in mind: IBM's plays are large enterprise plays, SMB always has been an afterthought)"

I guess that eliminates most of the companies in the world.

Posted by Richard Moy At 03:36:31 On 04/02/2011 | - Website - |

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