Social, Social, Social

While unified communications took center stage last year at Lotusphere, this year it's all about Social Business. If there was any doubt about this year's theme - Get Social, Do Business - that doubt was erased within the first five minutes of the conference. From special guest speaker Kevin Spacey (wow!) to every keynote presentation, Social Business took center stage. According to Alistair Rennie, GM, IBM Collaboration Solutions, a social business is an engaged business, is transparent and nimble, enabling teams to assemble and respond to situations quickly. Noting that the Lotus community will help lead this transformation, he added that being a social business is about the people - connecting people to businesses and people to each other. But, I thought it was even more important when he stated that companies need to "Think in terms of outcomes - what do businesses need, then think of the systems to help do this," and then create a social business framework. This is what we've been saying about unified communications, and the same is true for social software.

While much of the conference focused on social business, there was a great session on Unified Communications and Conferencing (UC²), presented by Caleb Barlow and John Del Pizzo. My favorite comment was, "The biggest value will be at intersection of unified communications and collaboration (UC²) and social business. UC² is the action behind your social business, providing tools you use when you need to do business now. Products like Lotus Notes, Portal, Connections, etc. help you find people, collaborate, make decisions, and manage teams, but at some point you need to take action on all the information coming at you and communicate." This is exactly spot-on and what I've been preaching for a while.

Voice communications is still critical, even in a social world, and social business tools need to be supplemented by and integrated with UC and voice communication capabilities. It sounds like the IBM folks get it. As one of the few companies with both social media and UC products and offerings, IBM can take a dominant position as these two worlds merge. There are a couple other vendors in this category, but IBM's social tools are more mature and deployed. However, as IBM customers move to LotusLive for social business capabilities including LotusLive Engage and LotusLive Connections, it will be harder to integrate the voice capabilities and UC capabilities. IBM envisions customers with cloud and hybrid deployments, and is working with Broadsoft, Meetrix, and InterCall for hosted UC services, but these will somehow have to integrate with LotusLive Connections and Engage.

Caleb did a nice job of laying out a UC² for Social Business checklist for organizations that want to integrate IBM's unified communications and social business offerings. The checklist includes the following steps:

• Deploy Sametime 8.5
   
• Integrate voice through Sametime Unified Telephony
   
• Embrace mobility
   
• Understand the implication of video
   
• Plan for new deployment options

The company is working with several partners to integrate voice through SUT, including, Aastra, Alcatel-Lucent, Avaya, Cisco, Mitel, ShoreTel, Siemens, and NEC. Another partner helping to move customers towards UC² is Plantronics, which offers headsets optimized for IBM's offerings.

Mobility is a key area, and IBM is making progress in its mobile UC² capabilities. In 2011, IBM will provide:

• presence and chat capabilities for Android devices,
   
• presence, chat, SUT dialing, and meetings on the iPhone and iPad,
   
• meetings on Blackberry devices and IOS clients.

IBM will deliver video, meetings, and SUT on Android, but there is no set timeframe for this.

The customers I spoke with at the conference were excited about what they heard - particularly the social business story and how it can help their workers better collaborate. It's harder to get people excited about UC, but IBM certainly has some new customers deploying UC, with more piloting it today and deploying it in the near future.

If IBM focuses on its social capabilities, adding the ability to integrate these with UC to enable click-to-connect from within Connections, for example, it will have a differentiated offering that will be very compelling.