Identifying IBM Lotus channel opportunities

Social networking was font and centre at IBM's annual Lotusphere conference in Orlando this week, and IBM's Lotus channel chief believes they're getting the right model in place to help partners capitalize on the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) business opportunity.m."

In an interview with ITBusiness.ca, Timothy E. Kounadis, director, worldwide channel SMB marketing, IBM Lotus Software, said portals and mashups are an important business opportunity that IBM and Lotus are investing strongly in today because, even in a tightening business environment, companies will still invest in outward-facing applications to maintain links to their customers.

Launched at Lotusphere, LotusLive is IBM's play for the online, enterprise-class social collaboration market, echoing in name at least rival Microsoft's more SMB-focused Office Live play. LotusLive is a cloud-based integrated portfolio of social networking and collaboration services tailored for business that will be offered in a hosted, software-as-a-service model. Various versions and bundles of LotusLive services will be rolled-out during 2009, tailored to specific verticals and markets. The first offering, expecting to ship in March, is dubbed Engage and includes Web meeting, network, instant messaging, file sharing, charts, forms and activities tools.

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Social networking was font and centre at IBM's annual Lotusphere conference in Orlando this week, and IBM's Lotus channel chief believes they're getting the right model in place to help partners capitalize on the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) business opportunity.m."

In an interview with ITBusiness.ca, Timothy E. Kounadis, director, worldwide channel SMB marketing, IBM Lotus Software, said portals and mashups are an important business opportunity that IBM and Lotus are investing strongly in today because, even in a tightening business environment, companies will still invest in outward-facing applications to maintain links to their customers.

Launched at Lotusphere, LotusLive is IBM's play for the online, enterprise-class social collaboration market, echoing in name at least rival Microsoft's more SMB-focused Office Live play. LotusLive is a cloud-based integrated portfolio of social networking and collaboration services tailored for business that will be offered in a hosted, software-as-a-service model. Various versions and bundles of LotusLive services will be rolled-out during 2009, tailored to specific verticals and markets. The first offering, expecting to ship in March, is dubbed Engage and includes Web meeting, network, instant messaging, file sharing, charts, forms and activities tools.

Kounadis said he sees three distinct opportunities for the channel with LotusLive. One is to resell the software though IBM's Passport Advantage program. Under the revenue model IBM has developed, for making the sale the reseller with get both a percentage of the ongoing subscription revenue and the maintenance revenue. And rather than receive the subscription revenue on a recurring monthly basis, Kounadis said partners will get their share of 12 months worth of SaaS revenue per customer from IBM up front.

"There's a lot more work to do with SaaS and how the channel plays, but we had a roundtable with partners at Lotusphere and it seems (this revenue model) is really going to meet their needs," said Kounadis.

The second channel opportunity revolves around ISVs working with IBM to develop applications to run on top of and within LotusLive. Long-term, an "app-store" approach will allow reseller and integration partners to chose from a catalogue of tested and integrated third-party partner LotusLive applications tailored to specific verticals.

And third, systems integration partners will have a role to play, with IBM seeing many customers wanting to run both SaaS and on-premise solutions, and needing an SI partner to integrate LotusLive with their Lotus Notes and Domino implementations.

Whether its online or on-premise at its heart its still Lotus, and there will still be a strong channel opportunity said Ytria president Eric Houvenaghel. Ytria is a Montreal-based partner that develops tools for Notes developers and most of its employees are, like Houvenaghel, former Notes consultants.

"We're seeing a lot of new stuff at Lotusphere, and there's always a lot of hype, but underneath it all Notes is till there," said Houvenaghel. He adds while companies such as Google and Microsoft are working on collaboration solutions, IBM's legacy of business-class solutions gives it an advantage pitching SaaS to the enterprise.