I attended both Lotusphere and GWAVACon last week, key industry events for users of IBM Lotus and Novell products, respectively. Both are important events and provided lots of useful information. In this column and my next one for publication later this week, I’ll share the key message I drew from each event.

The key message that I drew from Lotusphere is that Lotus really does seem to be getting some significant traction in the market. There is a mindset among many in the messaging and collaboration industry that Lotus is slowly bleeding customers and will continue to lose market share to its rivals.

However, Lotus’ numbers are impressive: the company saw more than 30% growth in the sales of Notes licenses during the fourth quarter of 2006 and sold more than 1 million Sametime seats in just the four-month period since Sametime 7.5 started shipping.

Lotus has cleaned up, tightened and strengthened its messaging story substantially. Hannover, now officially Release 8, will provide significantly greater messaging and collaborative capabilities. Lotus is working hard on building extensibility for legacy investments in telephony and other systems. Lotus’ social networking roadmap shows significant promise for improving collaboration.

Our own research shows that Sametime is the dominant choice among organizations that have formalized a standard instant messaging platform. Plus, if mere attendance at an event is any indication, the larger numbers for Lotusphere this year compared to attendance just a few years ago is a positive sign for the company.

Clearly, Microsoft Exchange is the most popular messaging and collaboration platform in use in the workplace – for a variety of good reasons – and I don’t expect the company to be supplanted in its role as market leader. That said, Lotus is a very strong second and is making some significant advances on both the messaging and collaboration fronts.

Michael Osterman is principal analyst of Osterman Research.