NEW DELHI
FEBRUARY 27, 2007

IBM successfully conducted its Lotusphere in the capital on February 20, 2007. This is an annual event for those customers who couldn't get to Orlando, where the main five-day Lotusphere event was held. The event was conceptualized to keep attendees abreast about the latest product developments around IBM's software.

R Dhamodaran, Director-Software Group, IBM India/South Asia said, "It is perhaps the most efficient way for customers to keep up with what is happening with Domino and Lotus. The event, which is designed to be informative and insightful, has various sessions to effectively cater to the diverse set of audience attending Lotusphere."

Antony Satyadas, Chief Competitive Marketing Officer, IBM Software Group informed that the event has various sessions like 'Future and Innovations', which concentrated on new technologies and innovations coming from the company's labs. The 'Hands-On Track' presented a unique opportunity for attendees to not only hear the talk, but to use the products as well. "Instructors will spend part of the session teaching the subject matter, and then the remainder time will be spent walking the attendees through their process, allowing them do the work themselves," he said.

The event also had other sessions on application development and infrastructure wherein product functionality; security, administration, directories and performance were discussed in detail. Dhamodaran elaborated that the event was used as a platform to bring new offerings to the table. He further noted, "Our sessions throw light on new technologies and innovations coming from our labs, including exciting new technologies and glimpses of the future from industry gurus."

"The new version of Lotus Sametime instant messaging and collaboration software will be available in the second quarter of 2007. It provides an open, extensible software platform that integrates rich presence, IM, email, unified messaging, Web, voice, video, telephony and business applications across multi-vendor environments," said Satyadas.

The company's officials said that Lotus is being reinvented through IBM's strong support of open standards. The Lotus Sametime 7.5 is the first to offer a major enterprise collaboration platform built on Eclipse framework. "The openness of Eclipse gives our partners and customers the flexibility they need to build a unified collaboration platform designed to meet the challenges of their business in an open and accessible environment," added Dhamodaran.

The event also touched upon another solutoin targeted at the SMB - WebSphere Portal Express Version 6.0. This is a collaborative portal solution that helps customers deploy a variety of web solutions be more responsive to their customers.

In addition, IBM announced the Lotus Notes' open beta program starting this month. The new client includes upgrades to core applications and expanded integration with the new collaboration tools announced today. IBM also gave an overview of Lotus Notes and Lotus Domino 8 that will include advanced usability features and new interface to manage information overload.

The event saw the participation of customers - existing and potential - as well as business partners and software developers. Lotusphere reportedly boasts a year-to-year attendee return rate of 90 percent, far above the industry average of 50-60 percent. "One reason attendees keep coming back is that Lotusphere is an event where customers and partners can get first-hand, hands-on information about IBM collaboration software directly from the people who develop and market it," informed Dhamodaran.

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