IBM Connect 2014, held last week at Walt Disney World in Orlando, featured an impressive number and breadth of product announcements, as it usually does. The right side of the photo below lists the most important announcements made this year. Many of these announcements may be viewed as a steady continuation of progress executing the portfolio strategy that IBM Collaboration Solutions (ICS) group first articulated at Lotusphere 2010, under the name "Project Vulcan". The goal of Project Vulcan was (and continues to be) the seamless integration of IBM's traditional collaboration, social, unified communications, content management and analytics capabilities. Over the last three years, IBM has done a good job of first integrating those capabilities, then unifying their look and feel across individual product offerings. At Connect 2014, IBM revealed its next steps toward making the Project Vulcan vision real. Two announcements in particular, one addressing user experience consolidation and the other unified offering branding, demonstrate their continuing progress. IBM Mail Next The unveiling of a working prototype of the next version of IBM's Notes email client received perhaps the most enthusiastic response from attendees of any announcement made during the Opening General Session of Connect 2014. The client is code-named IBM Mail Next and will be available in beta sometime in the first half of 2014. No general availability target date was announced, but IBM will give a progress update in a public webcast on April 17, 2014. As you can see in the screenshot below, the current iteration of the Mail Next dashboard is about much more than just email. In fact, there is not a single email message shown here, only a graphic that serves as a new message counter and link to the inbox! Instead, we see other things that are important to an individual worker, including people, calendar events, pending tasks to be completed and actions due from others. While this design is not final, it clearly signals IBM's intent to create a dashboard that brings together email and real-time messages, social networking and collaboration activities, must-read content, important events and urgent tasks. In short, it aims to provide, in one place, the tools and information most employees need to get work done. As such, Mail Next is a Trojan horse of sorts. Most people still do the majority of their work together in email. As a result, many IBM customers have employees currently interfacing with Connections services through the Notes client. Mail Next acknowledges this and gathers even more Connections (and other IBM collaboration) services into a dashboard along with email. It is a logical assumption that the Mail Next dashboard will eventually be the default user interface to all IBM collaboration, messaging and content services on the desktop. IBM just can't position and sell it that way yet, hence the continued emphasis on the email component in the offering's name. Additional supporting evidence for the gradual shift away from email emphasis in the IBM worker experience can be found in another product roadmap detail revealed at Connect 2014. It was announced in the Mobile keynote that components of IBM Connections (Files, Communities and Activities) will be integrated with the Notes Traveler mobile client for the first time this year. It appears that Traveler is morphing to become the mobile dashboard for IBM collaboration, messaging and content services, just as Mail Next is doing on the desktop. IBM Mail Next and Notes Traveler seem destined to be comprehensive user interfaces for expertise location, knowledge sharing and getting work done in desktop and mobile computing environments, respectively. IBM Connections The other major announcement that clearly showed IBM moving ever closer to the Project Vulcan vision was the rebranding of all current ICS offerings under the Connections name. Some well-established brands - Notes and Sametime - will disappear completely. Other offerings will have the Connections name added to their current branding, ie. "IBM Connections Docs". IBM will go to market with the following names, as announced at Connect 2014 and confirmed in a blog post after the event by Kramer Reeves, Director, Product Management, ICS. ICS Offering RebrandingOld NameNew NameIBM Notes MailIBM Connections MailIBM Sametime ChatIBM Connections ChatIBM Sametime MeetingsIBM Connections MeetingsIBM DocsIBM Connections Docs This is a savvy move by IBM. It is not a repackaging of capabilities, so (unfortunately) there won't be fewer SKUs for IBM salespeople and customers to wade through. However, this initiative will make it easier for IBM to create new offering bundles and to more clearly articulate the aggregate value proposition of the ICS offerings portfolio, especially as more customers access these services from the cloud. It is fair to say that IBM just took the lead over Microsoft and Google in simplifying the marketing and selling of integrated enterprise collaboration, communication and content management services. Conclusions Email is not going away in organizations, despite the demonstrated benefits of working out loud in social software. With its Connect 2014 announcements, IBM has acknowledged that and will position its email clients (Mail Next and Notes Traveler) as integration points for all the other services that are being rebranded with the Connections name. However, IBM's emphasis on email as a productivity tool is slowly diminishing, with social, real-time communication, collaboration and content management capabilities gaining focus in the user experience of the company's redesigned digital work environments. That shift in tool emphasis is also happening from a branding perspective. Just as the Lotus brand was superseded by IBM's over a number of year, the Notes brand is being replaced by Connections on the desktop, and it is reasonable to anticipate that IBM Notes Traveler will similarly become "IBM Connections Traveler" with its next release. The move to position desktop and mobile clients as the hub of communication, collaboration and content-centric activities should not be regarded as a failure of IBM Software's recent focus on social business. Rather, it should be viewed as a rebalancing of portfolio components to accommodate the reality that social business transformation is likely to be made in small steps over a number of years, instead of in one, relatively quick, big-bang initiative. IBM has again made good progress toward its Project Vulcan strategic vision in the past year. The announcements made at IBM Connect 2014 are about helping existing and potential customer organizations to better understand and leverage the synergies created within the ICS offerings portfolio. More importantly, the IBM dashboards announced and demonstrated at the event should make it easier for individual workers to use the combined communication, collaboration, content and task management capabilities available to them on the desktop and mobile devices to locate expertise, share knowledge and get work done.
