17 Scenes From Lotusphere 2009

IBM Lotus customers and channel partners dropped into Orlando, Fla., in January for Lotusphere 2009, the 16th annual gathering of the Lotus faithful. Despite the tough economy, Lotus executives said paid attendance was up 2 percent from 2008 when some 7,000 attended. Lotus attendees are a notoriously loyal bunch. But given the bitter cold in much of the northern U.S., the Orlando climate was certainly an added attraction.

Coffee in hand, Lotusphere attendees lined up Monday morning before filing into the main ballroom at the Dolphin Hotel for the Lotusphere opening session.

IBM Lotus General Manager Bob Picciano was the host for the Lotusphere opening session. Picciano replaced Mike Rhodin in April after Rhodin was tapped to be general manager of IBM's northeast Europe operations. Picciano, a 21-year IBM veteran, was previously vice president of sales for IBM's Information Management organization.

Lotus' debut of LotusLive, the company's new Software-as-a-Service applications, was the top announcement during the opening session. The first offering, LotusLive Engage, developed under the code name "Bluehouse," is a collection of on-demand applications (contacts and profiles, file sharing and storage, activities, online meetings, instant messaging, forms and charts) geared toward helping businesses collaborate with partners, suppliers, customers and others outside the organization.

In addition to the LotusLive debut, opening session attendees were treated to demonstrations of upcoming releases of Lotus applications including Quickr 8.2, due out in the second quarter, and Connections 2.5, slated to ship in the third quarter. Here, the audience is getting a demonstration of the new application development capabilities in Domino Designer 8.5, which solution providers can use to customize their desktop applications.

"We're going to redefine the collaboration [software] category by taking Lotus to more people and more places than ever before," said Kristen Lauria, IBM Lotus marketing and channel vice president, speaking about LotusLive during the opening session. That effort will provide new opportunities for solution providers, she said, and she promised "air cover" marketing and advertising support for channel partners for the LotusLive initiative.

The opening session included an appearance by actor and Saturday Night Live alumnus Dan Aykroyd, who, in keeping with the theme of collaboration, spoke about the importance of cast and crew working together on movie sets to keep film production on track.

Performance artists Blue Man Group opened the keynote session Monday morning with one of their signature acts that includes playing percussion instruments made of PVC pipe.

Blue Man Group also closed the keynote session with another popular act where they pound away on illuminated drums splashed with colored fluid.

Some VIPs not only got front row seats for the opening session, they got to sit in "Lotus yellow" bean bag chairs.

Details of new marketing, demand generation and advertising support for business partners were outlined the day before the main Lotusphere session during Business Development Day. Tim Kounadis, IBM Lotus director of worldwide channel and SMB marketing, was the host for the day's main session. The theme for the day was "The Next Renaissance," hence the slides of classic paintings behind the channel chief.

At times a good GPS system would have come in handy while navigating around the crowded Dolphin Hotel and Convention Center complex. Signs like this only made the trek from one session to the next feel even longer.

The deepening recession was a major topic among the vendors, solution providers and attendees at Lotusphere. But the economy didn't seem to hinder the steady traffic on the Lotus Product Showcase exhibition floor as show-goers checked out the product demos from some 150 vendors.

Research In Motion's booth at the Product Showcase was crowded throughout the conference. RIM and Lotus unveiled plans to provide Lotus collaboration software and development tools for RIM's popular BlackBerry smartphones. In the second quarter, BlackBerry users will gain access to documents produced with the Lotus Symphony personal productivity applications. Support for spreadsheets and presentations will be added later. Also available by mid-year will be a BlackBerry client for the Lotus Connections social networking application. And the two companies are developing BlackBerry support for the Lotus Domino Designer and XPages development tools, making it easier for solution providers to build smartphone software.

Trilog Group's ProjExec 4.0 collaborative project management solution, which runs on IBM Lotus collaboration applications, was awarded the IBM Lotus Award for Best Total Lotus Software Solution. The awards are given to IBM PartnerWorld members that specialize in Lotus software solutions.

Elguji Software's IdeaJam idea management application was awarded the CTO Award for the Americas for having the most innovative product on the Product Showcase floor. The latest version of IdeaJam supports Lotus Domino XPages, the new Web application development technology in Domino Designer 8.5.

While technology was the focus throughout most of the Lotusphere conference, attendees stopped what they were doing Tuesday and crowded around one of the televisions set up in the Dolphin Hotel to watch Barack Obama as he was sworn in as the 44th president of the United States.

The crowd frequently applauded during Obama's inauguration speech at such lines as "We are ready to lead once more," and there was long, sustained applause at the conclusion of his speech.