The Lotusphere 2010 conference in Orlando last week drew developers from around the world to its product showcase, including several Canadian companies.
Toronto-based Extracomm Inc. offers auditing and compliance tools for the Lotus Notes/Domino platform. IBM (NYSE: IBM) itself announced several upcoming enhancements to Lotus Notes in the second half of 2010 including audit capabilities, social analytics and additional mobile support. Extracomm’s director for Latin American distribution, Richard Freund, said the company’s compliance offerings are in line with IBM vision for Lotus Notes. “It’s good to see we are moving in the right direction with auditing,” said Freund.
IBM also said it is opening its LotusLive platform, the hosted version of its Lotus software, to more partners. Marc Gingras, CEO & founder with Tungle Corp., a Montreal-based company that builds meeting scheduling tools for Lotus Notes, said making LotusLive more accessible to the development community is a great move on IBM’s part. Gingras said bringing to the cloud a platform that has been around for some time and “is a really solid application” will now make those capabilities available to be accessed in alternative ways.
Also at the product showcase was Waterloo-based Research In Motion Ltd., which announced a reseller agreement with IBM to sell its new BlackBerry client versions of Lotus Quickr and Lotus Connections. RIM’s product manager for enterprise messaging and collaboration, Valerie Wong, said IBM’s Project Vulcan, the company’s vision unveiled that week for how collaboration will evolve, reflects how applications are increasingly less about the technology and tools than they are about how people actually work. “If you need to have that application that’s in the cloud and still have that interacting with something that’s behind the firewall, that should be something that happens seamlessly and securely without the end customer having to worry about it,” said Wang.
