IBM's 'enterprise Facebook' is a hit

Lotus Connections is "the fastest-growing software in IBM history when it comes to market adoption," said an IBM social software strategist on board the Lotus Bus. IBM discussed iNotes, Symphony, security and boundary workers during its stop in Toronto.

IBM Corp. has embarked on an 18-city tour across North America to promote Lotus and LotusLive, a suite of software-as-a-service (SaaS) versions of the Lotus end-user applications for the enterprise.

"Clients can come on the bus and chat with us about any Lotus technologies, spanning from e-mail to real-time collaboration to social networks to development tools," said Tyrone Lobo, software sales for Lotus at IBM Canada Ltd.

On board the Lotus Bus, which parked at Ryerson University in Toronto on Monday, Lobo was one of several IBM executives, salespeople and technical specialists ready to answer questions and provide demos to media and the public.

Lotus technical specialist Suselynn Lai provided a demo of the latest version of Lotus Connections, V2.5 released this August, which she referred to as "enterprise Facebook."

Connections resembles Facebook's look and feel, including the ability to post and comment on status updates, view a list of user activities and add widgets to your profile page that pull information from external sites such as LinkedIn and Twitter.

Users don't have to spend a lot of time creating their profile page, as details like titles and contact information are automatically pulled from the system, Lai pointed out. Users can also create a "watch list" to follow the activities of specific people within their network, tag themselves and others with keywords, and bookmark particular pages within the application.

The social-networking-for-the-enterprise application is a top seller at IBM. "Lotus Connections is the fastest-growing software in IBM history when it comes to market adoption," said Jay Maru, social software strategist at IBM Canada Ltd.

According to Maru, there is "a tremendous amount of need" for the product. "The market fully understands the value of social media ... now they are trying to internalize it," he said.

Organizations are asking how "do we leverage this technology to drive the same amount of value ... but have the corporate policy and structure around it to prevent any audit exposures? That's where Connections plays really well," said Maru.

LotusLive Connections, the cloud-based version of Connections, became available in June.The two versions are the same, explained an IBM spokesperson, except Lotus Connections is the version clients buy to install on-premise, while LotusLive Connections is an external cloud service they "rent."

The latest addition to LotusLive is iNotes, a Web-based e-mail service hosted by IBM. A lighter, Web-based version of the LotusLive Notes e-mail application, iNotes works with Notes and Microsoft Exchange. Pricing starts at USD $3 per month per user.

The scalable service is targeted to SMEs as well as large enterprises. IBM is seeing a lot of interest from clients that want a more reliable, secure and private e-mail service instead of relying on one of the consumer options, said Lobo.