Highlights of IBM Connect 2014

Lots going on at IBM's Connect 2014 conference last week in Orlando. From Seth Meyers (SNL, moving to "Late Night") and Scott Adams (Dilbert) to much evidence of IBM's continued concerted push into social business as the future way to organize work.

Key to much of the conference was some important rebranding-"IBM Connections" has emerged as the new umbrella brand encompassing mail, meetings, chat, office tools, collaboration, social business, analytics, and content management.

Sametime was barely mentioned from the main stage, although some of its voice and video capabilities were part of the demos. The Sametime brand is being de-emphasized in favor of "Connections Meetings" and "Connections Chat". Jeff Schick, Vice President of Social Business, told me that the significant voice and video upgrades in Sametime 9.0 had a major launch last fall, and the decision was made to focus on the other new capabilities in Connections. There were several workshops on the Sametime capabilities. Perhaps this lower emphasis was a realistic approach given the large number of announcements and new concepts presented, but a little disappointing given the benefits we at UCStrategies.com see by seamlessly integrating across whichever modality best fits the user's communications requirement. Sametime's voice and video functionality is certainly part of that picture.

"Mail Next", IBM's new email client experience, was an important announcement and well-received. Designers have brought together email and social business interactions into one interface, and have re-thought how users would like to interact with unwieldy inboxes by building in ways to help users focus on what's important. Here's a screen-shot:

I can select the images of those with whom I frequently interact, or icons representing current workflows. The number of new messages is displayed, and hovering over their image (as in the diagram) brings up icons to launch messages or contacts, to access relevant documents, and even to see their relationships in the organization. The boxes along the bottom show current activities; messages and documents can be dragged here to organize work activities. In addition, there are a number of features designed to streamline handling mail volumes. Analytics and mailbox management functionality will focus user attention on priority issues. Threads that are lower priority can be "muted".

I went to the Developer Lab to get a more in-depth understanding, and was immediately drawn into a Q&A about how I would like Mail Next to work. Clearly still under development! Beta launch is scheduled for the first half of 2014, with rollout scheduled for the second half of this year. Initially it will be offered as a cloud solution; later, it will be on premise. What about Notes? Well, "Lotus" has disappeared, but it looks like both Notes and Mail Next will coexist, at least for a while.

As mentioned above, Sametime capabilities were not focus at this conference, as the major upgrades in 9.0 last September broadened the portfolio capabilities. Some of the workshops did emphasize announced capabilities, especially in video. In particular, the video client uses H.264 SVC dynamic bandwidth allocation to encode the video stream in multiple layers of different resolutions and frame rates. Recipient clients can select the appropriate layer depending on their capabilities without requiring transcoding. Sametime now supports interoperability with any video endpoint that can be accessed through a SIP connection; H.323 connections would require a gateway.

Another key theme was the integration of Kenexa into Connections. Kenexa was acquired a year ago and brings strong talent management and social business analysis capabilities to help enterprises better understand and manage their human resources. Watson capabilities were frequently mentioned as potential analysis engines for current Connections content. Jeff Schick talked about adding Watson analytics in the future that would monitor email, schedule meetings, provide information in response to requests, identify individuals who should be brought into a collaboration, retrieve and organize information in preparation for a meeting, and similar activities.

IBM is clearly gearing up to incorporate user experience into its products going forward. There was a main stage segment about the IBM Design Studio, and the presentation included a Steve Jobs quote that IBM seems to be building around: "Design is not just what a product looks like and feels like. Design is how it works." They also announced a new Interactive Experience consulting group, designed to help enterprises capture, analyze, and incorporate information about customer preferences and incorporate them into interactions, as well as to drive innovative approaches to IBM's Smarter Workforce initiatives.

This conference continued the themes we have been seeing from IBM over the last several years. Increased focus on bringing together diverse elements of computing and communications into a cohesive set of products and services with a re-doubled emphasis on social business and analytics. Perhaps too slow and too cautious in some areas, but a number of well-designed product offerings that certainly will appeal to their established customer base.