IBM Social Tools Could Bring New Opportunity To Solution Providers

Quickr new life and opportunities

The goal of these offerings is to combine the ease-of-use and Web 2.0 hipness of social networking capabilities with IT-friendly security and control.

IBM buried the Connections ship date target on its Web site. Connections lets team members share bookmarks and user profile information, collaborate on projects, find people in their organization with the right skills for a task, and view group calendars.

QuickR, which some view as a bulked-up follow-on to Lotus QuickPlace Web conferencing software, features an AJAX-based user interface and ships with Wiki templates. It also supports Atom-based news feeds.

IBM executives next week will host a teleconference on the new products, all first publicly introduced at Lotusphere in January. Sources said Quickr will ship at the same time as Connections. IBM execs promised both product sets for the first half of the year, and it seems they're making those dates with a few days to spare.

Carl Tyler, founder of Epilio, a Boston-based start-up specializing in enterprise instant messaging and collaboration, said there is potentially a lot of partner opportunity around Quickr in building and customizing templates and "doing business-in-a-box type things."

Connections is interesting in that IBM is using it internally to connect partners with each other. "Notes partners have had that ability for years, but this gives that collaboration capability to a whole new range of partners," Tyler said.

Ron Herardian, chief systems architect for Global System Services, a Mountain View, Calif., specialist in collaborative applications, agrees. "We see these technologies as something that can be integrated into portal applications, and that's an opportunity. They enrich and expand the whole environment," he said.

When it comes to moving "social networking" wares into the more restricted corporate environment, IBM may have the edge over other vendors, some pundits and solution providers said.

IBM, with its roots in glass-house, secure computing, has some background here, said Dana Gardner, founder of Interarbor Solutions, a Gilford, N.H.-based consultant.

IBM's pitch is "it's easier to go from the enterprise into the ether than to go from the ether into the enterprise," Gardner said. Google, the kingpin of consumer-oriented and ad-supported wares, is taking the opposite approach, Gardner said.

IBM's strength is its traditional cross-platform pledge. While Microsoft SharePoint has momentum in departmental work spaces, the "showstopper there is it still runs only on Windows and nothing else," said Peter O'Kelly, analyst with The Burton Group. "At that point, for some big companies the back-up pick becomes IBM. Or maybe Oracle."

Herardian agrees with Gardner's point about corporate wariness regarding bringing in consumer-oriented technologies. "IT folks would much rather move from inside the firewall out than the other way around."

IBM/Lotus has been there already with Sametime, still the leader in corporate-sanctioned instant messaging. "They were there early on in enterprise IM," he said. "They were absolutely the first and they totally get it."

As the battle broadens from just IM and presence to unified communications, which melds those things with VoIP telephony and Web conferencing, IBM, Microsoft and Cisco are all squaring off against each other. IBM and Microsoft trade off claims of partnerships with PBX vendors that are viewed as old-world incumbents in this realm.

In unified communications, Microsoft will lead with Office Communications Server 2007, due out this quarter. It is the successor product to Live Communication Server or LCS.

Epilio's Tyler works with both IBM's and Microsoft offerings. IBM has the advantage in terms of rich client customization and programming capabilities, he noted.

"It has a Java API available to developers so we can build whatever we want. Microsoft does not have that, so for third-party client customization Sametime wins hands down now. Two years ago, it was the opposite," Tyler said.

Tyler says that the whole notion of unified communications sounds great in general, but partners need to go into accounts and show specific applicability to customer needs.

"This is like knowledge management was years ago. From a high level it sounds great, but that value" has to be shown by partners in the field, he said.