The much anticipated Opening General Session from Lotusphere 2010 did not disappoint. In a massive auditorium that was full to bursting, the event kicked off with two very cool rock violinists being joined on stage by two excellent drummers. The high energy music was a very fitting precursor to a set of announcements that will surely rock the competition in the very near future.
The guest speaker was none other than William Shatner, who was warmly received by the Trekkies and the Geeks, which pretty much comprised the whole audience.
Bob Picciano thanked the assembled audience for their support, both of the brand and him personally, before introducing his successor Alistair Rennie.
Alistair introduced 4 customer speakers, Continental Tyres, Bank of Zurich, RIM, and continuing the noisy and futuristic theme, the CTO of General Motors who drove up to the front of the stage in a bright yellow, Lotus Knows customised Corvette. They all delivered compelling testimonials about the value of Lotus to their organisation.
A series of brilliantly choreographed product demonstrations worked seamlessly to showcase the capabilites of the current product portfolio giving all present an inspirational overview of what is possible.
An interesting fact – Notes 8.5.1 is twice as fast in the pickup than any other version in Lotus history and that is hardly surprising with DAOS, ID Vault, iPhone support, Traveller, Xpages and numerous other benefits. It was also the most expensive release yet, really underlining how serious Lotus is about Notes.
And a clever quote – “Customers have changed their Outlook on collaboration and Exchanged it for something better”, which was based on a great statistic – 18378 new Notes customers since the Notes 8 was released.
The big announcement was Project Vulcan – which is a vision of evolution for Lotus products. It will become an aggregation or federation of email, calendars, profiles, to do lists and social analytics all in one place. It’s designed to filter out noise from real-time conversations, make recommendations and provide relevant content. More on this later.
A funny story – I was introduced to Bob Picciano at the UKLUG party last night, and asked him what the project was named prior to confirming William Shatner as guest speaker – he laughed and said it was very bland ‘Lotus Solutions 3.0’, and that IBM were delighted to have the excuse to rename it !
