I rencently had the chance to attend Lotusphere in order to gauge the feeling of what what happening at IBM/Lotus. I took some time to write this post because I was not sure of the point of view I had to take.

It was obvious that “I saw tools doing this and this” was not relevant. In the enterprise 2.0 solutions arena I don’t think this is the point. There are many tools that help to create communities, wikis, social networks, twitter-likes… So when you are IBM (or Microsoft) you must have everything in your portfolio while smaller competitors may focus on only one part of the E2.0 offer. Notice that the latters tend to enrich their offer what makes  products  looking more and more similar with the risk of including a very good application into a suite that is not as good.

In short, if you’re looking for a product benchmark I think there are enough things writen on the web. In my opinion the point is elsewhere. Being able to make bricks coherent, being able to provide user with a coherent experience in various contexts, find one’s place in the workday workflow. And, last but not least : demonstrate that the needs of organizations are understood and that a clear and relevant vision of the future exists.

Let’s see how things are doing.

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