Lotus Comes to You once again delivered for Australian audiences in 2008. This year the Australian legs were part of a 220 global event roadshow following the Lotusphere conference which is held every January in Orlando Florida.

Beyond the overviews and live demonstrations of the latest point and version upgrades for Notes and Domino, WebSphere, Quickr, and Connections (which are always interesting) this year it was specifically the two things that were only alluded to which held the most strike. I hate to say it but my initial thoughts were that Lotus had once again understated their best insights and underplayed a great opportunity for the region. When I caught up with John Dunderdale, and Jonathan Stern afterwards they assured me it was all part of the plan....

Don't get me wrong. As usual the technology of the collaboration suite was both elegant and excellent. But we are observing two things in the local region that soften the impact of such technical demonstrations. Firstly, Australian customers linger on older versions of Notes Domino. They are stable and functional applications after all. The second is that as an analyst firm we are more frequently asked about the sense of migrating "off" Notes as opposed to "off" Exchange. So despite the great technology, somewhere along the line Australian enterprises are missing out on the Lotus Experience forcing an apples:oranges comparison across the sexy new ubiquitous collaboration or unified communications movement. But back to the two teasers…

The first great announcement was the imminent arrival of Lotus Foundation, an on-prem software-as-a-service collaboration suite for small-medium enterprises (up to 50 people). As an on-premise SaaS offering Lotus Foundation will seriously challenge Microsoft in Australia's managed collaboration market. First and foremost, buyers will now have a choice for a small-footprint corporate email (and more) solution. Enterprises currently using hosted exchange (which is not pure-SaaS anyway) are often challenged by the short-comings of the model. Namely a lack of, or a bare minimum of service levels regarding outages, restitution, functionality etc. With the release of Foundation, Microsoft will be forced to put pressure on their hosted channel partners to implement service levels from entry level offerings to deep into the managed solution stack. Based on our experience, I know what we would recommend today.

The second was the application of gaming technologies into the enterprise which will make LotusSphere 2009 in Orlando not to be missed. We first wrote about gaming technologies entering the corporate market in 2007, and have subsequently included questions in our annual Spending and Investment Study to gain some insights into the awareness of what we are calling the “virtual built environment” (~55% planning or considering use). So we were obviously excited by future announcements in support of an enterprise gaming platform. The hand-off’s between the behaviours that under-pin gaming and collaboration technologies are numerous and intrinsic: search and retrieval, event-based interaction, player collaboration and spatial navigation just to name a few. If they can pull it off, the realization of a platform that allows the seemless transition and integration of corporate and virtual information environments will be paradigm changing for the industry way beyond the hype of SecondLife.

But returning to yesterday’s event, as always it is an inevitability for IBM and Lotus to be great in the collaboration and UC space. They will show up, perhaps after the party has started but that will not be for any short-comings in innovation. In that they are hard to parallel. It is simply their frustrating knack to be able to innovate quickly but go-to-market with all the speed of Methuselah...or so it just seems. However, launch dates aside, if I was a regionally based company with up to 50 people, and on the lookout for a collaboration suite to take us forward for the next 5 years, then I would certainly find it prudent to wait until May to at least see what choice awaits us just around the corner.