This quote in an article by Network World’s John Fontana says it all:

“I think customers are very content,” says Bruce Elgort, president of Elguji Software. “What they did not see [at Lotusphere] is yet another set of versions, another set of features. They saw continuity, they saw that Vulcan is the Lotus vision for consuming services, something that is more standards-based and they saw software like Connections that is ready for the enterprise.”

Elgort was talking about an initiative called “Project Vulcan”, which was unveiled at last week’s Lotusphere 2010. It also marked the triumphant return of Alistair Rennie, as the new General Manager of the Lotus business unit (replacing Bob Picciano, who will become head of sales for all of IBM Software). Rennie will work closely with another former GM of Lotus, Mike Rhodin, who is taking charge of a newly formed “solutions” group within IBM Software. Its counterpart under the new organization is a “middleware” group, headed by Robert LeBlanc (who had been in charge of worldwide software sales and marketing).

Both Rhodin and Rennie are well-versed in and committed to solutions that are built around open APIs and RESTful programming models. As Rennie explains in the Network World article, “Vulcan becomes the framework for integration of collaboration and business services with refinement and context delivered through social analytics.” In other words, IBM expects end-users to build their own solutions through HTML5-based browsers in ways that mimic their experience with their favorite social networking tools.

IBM’s Lotus-branded software has long had hooks into the social realm with products like Connections (a variant of Lotus Notes/Domino), Sametime and Quickr. At Lotusphere demos showcased how the combination also supports mobile/social communications, using client software that runs on RIM Blackberries.

A few years ago, when he was GM of Lotus, Mike Rhodin told me that the most interesting developments wold always combine two-or-more of the packaged solutions and that higher productivity and value are always “at the interstices” (at least I think that was the quote). These interstitial developments are at the heart of Recombinant Communications and the product announcements from Lotusphere, along with organizational changes highlight IBM’s presence (along with the likes of Cisco, Google, Microsoft and dozens of others) on Opus Research’s Recombinant Communications Leader Board.

Categories: Articles

Tags: IBM, Recombinant Communications, Enterprise Software, Lotus