News Analysis: IBM Lotus and SAP - The Duet Sequel?

January 21, 2008

Before 7000 customers and partners at LotusSphere, IBM and SAP revealed "Project Atlantic", the code name for SAP Business Suite and IBM Lotus Notes integration. The initial release is planned to ship in the fourth quarter of 2008 and will be sold by both companies. Some quick thoughts:

Collaboration environments just the start of things to come for SAP. Access to new collaboration platforms tied to SAP's business processes will potentially provide users with more relevant and just-in-time information. Future releases plan to include support for reporting and analytics, SAP work flows, and the role based nature of Lotus Notes. One could expect some additional collaboration capabilities that match to the new Domino server.
"Atlantic" represents the next logical step for SAP to support other user experience platforms. IBM and SAP have had a long history of partnerships. Partnership with IBM extends SAP's agnostic information management ecosystem. Previous partnerships with Adobe (i.e. Flex and Interactive Forms) and Microsoft via Duet (i.e. Microsoft Office integration) follow a concerted mission to be omnipresent in the enterprise information workplace. By being present and "seamless", SAP can increase its penetration with information workers. The result - each partner can benefit from the increased adoption and usage. The addition of IBM's Lotus Notes completes the enterprise on-premise arena.

The bottom line
This latest move emphasizes the growing coopetition among the Big 4 software vendors to expand their ecosystems and increase the usage among existing install bases. With agnostic access of information being a key driver to creating relevant role based information, one should expect new partnerships with Web 2.0 user experiences such as Google in the near future. The real question - " Will Oracle follow suit with announcements from Microsoft or IBM? or Has SAP developed a lead?"

(The personal contents in this blog do not reflect the opinions, ideas, thoughts, points of view, and any other potential attribution of my current, past, or future employers.)
Copyrighted 2008 by R Wang. All rights reserved

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