IBM/Lotus struts its stuff

IBM/Lotus held its annual shindig in Orlando this week. Called Lotusphere, it was packed with devotees plus a quite a few analysts and journalists. Yours truly included.

Perhaps Orlando was deliberately chosen, because the event was by far the most interesting thing going on there. And, miracle of miracles, IBM pulled some interesting rabbits out of the corporate hat.

Let's start with mashups, or composite applications, which sounds a heck of a lot more enterprisey. The on-stage demo's showed how mashups could be created with a few drags and drops - exactly what Teqlo was trying to do before it realised it didn't have a decent business model.

Corporate information could be surfaced, through SOA or (I believe) through Websphere, external information could be picked up through widgets and onscreen information could be highlighted and used as input to the mashup. The end result was a little window which would deliver the information you wanted, presented in the form you most needed it. Graphs, charts, maps, whatever. Mashups can be catalogued and shared, making for ready re-use and potential time savings.

The only awkwardness is in how much you let users do themselves before having to push the mashups through to IT for approval. Something that hoovers masses of data every few seconds, or some logic that dives into a dead loop wouldn't go down too well.

What else? Well, IBM hasn't been best known for delivering software to small and medium enterprises. It's now going to push hard by packaging up a whole bunch of collaboration stuff and offer it as a service. Code-named Bluehouse, it will be a few months before it sees the light of day. Except you might want to investigate the beta version. It's based on aimed at users of Lotus Foundations, a software set that will also be provided as an appliance or straightforward installable software for organisations with between 5 and 500 connected users.

A unified interface might sound boring, but the idea of working on multiple applications through a consistent interface makes software a lot more attractive to users. If they switch applications without really realising it then the clunkiness and time wasting of conventional interfaces become all too obvious. It's been tried before but the difference this time is that the user can incorporate the elements they want rather than be stuck with someone else's idea of what a user needs.

Lotus went high wide and handsome on social networking tools. Its own Connections was made all the more interesting by the fact that it can integrate with external services. The integration potential of Socialtext and Atlassian wikis made the point, especially given that IBM has its own wiki engine. And this is another thing that came out of the conference: that IBM encourages openness and integration. While it has its own world, this does have very porous edges which could lead to an interesting software ecosphere which doesn't necessarily put IBM at the centre.

In some ways it doesn't matter if IBM takes over the world with its software innovations because, if it does nothing else, it helps to raise the bar. The focus of Lotusphere was a hundred percent on making the users' lives better and more productive. And, it has to be said, more enjoyable and fulfilling.

I'll drink to that. Off on holiday now. See you in two weeks.