IBM unveils Lotus Center for Advanced Collaboration in Pune

Pune: IBM unveiled the Lotus Center for Advanced Collaboration (LCAC) recently. This is a first of its kind in Asia Pacific. IBM aims to grow this center into a regional hub for Lotus advanced collaboration strategy and solutions. The center located at the IBM Software Lab in Pune will host technical expertise to help customers and partners adopt collaboration technology in their environment. Customers can leverage this center to get access to the latest offerings and best practices from IBM Lotus collaboration offerings, and create roadmaps and strategies that best suit their business needs.

According to a recent CIO study, collaboration is the first concern as well as the first priority for most organizations. Lotus Portfolio will help clients collaborate smartly. Daikin, Asian Paints, Tata Sky, HSBC are some of the clients in India who have seen greater value in leveraging Lotus offerings for better collaboration and optimization. Recently, Gartner reported Lotus to lead the way in e-mail collaboration. Garner also rated IBM in it's magic quadrant for Web Sphere Portal.

Alistair Rennie, VP-Development and Technical Support, IBM said, “In today's increasingly global economy, the importance of making faster and better decisions has increased dramatically, which has made advanced collaboration tools a critical aspect of daily work. Lotus has lead in the delivery of tools for enterprise social computing, real time messaging and telephony, e-mail and advanced team collaboration. We are making it easier to acquire these capabilities through LotusLive, our web-based Software-as-a-service and Lotus Foundations, a Linux-based appliance for small and medium business. With the launch of this center, we are today in a position to showcase some our industry leading offerings clients in India/South Asia region.”

Dr Ponani Gopalakrishnan, VP-Software Lab, IBM India said, “The LCAC will develop specialized focus on high value areas like social networking tools and capabilities for enterprise collaboration, Software-as-a-service (SaaS), cloud computing based on premise enterprise collaboration software, Lotus Notes and Domino offerings and advanced messaging and real time collaboration. The center will develop an ecosystem that will showcase industry solutions, best practices, user case studies, and demonstrations with world wide solution experts and resources accessible locally for a much more integrated work environment”.

IBM recently expanded a set of social software tools and capabilities for enterprise collaboration that brought popular features like micro-blogging from the home into the business environment. With aggressive pricing starting as low as $3 per user per month, the new IBM LotusLive iNotes cloud service allows overburdened IT departments to take advantage of IBM's leadership in enterprise. IBM also announced a new, enterprise collaboration service — LotusLive, that delivers the benefits of cloud computing to millions.