IBM unveils Lotus Center for Advanced Collaboration in Pune, India

Center to be the regional hub for Lotus Advanced Collaboration strategy & solutions in Asia Pacific.

IBM has unveiled the Lotus Center for Advanced Collaboration (LCAC), the only one of its kind in Asia Pacific. The center located at the IBM Software Lab in Pune will host dedicated 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 & best practices from IBM Lotus collaboration offerings, and create roadmaps and strategies that best suit their business needs.

IBM aims to create this center as a regional hub for Lotus advanced collaboration strategy & solutions.

According to a recent CIO study, collaboration is #1 concern and #1 priority for most organizations and we are best poised with our Lotus Portfolio to help clients collaborate smarter. 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 email collaboration and rated IBM in Gartner’s magic quadrant for WebSphere Portal.

Alistair Rennie, Vice President, 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, email 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 – Vice-President, India Software Lab, IBM 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. IBM has seen a many customers post its launch who want to adopt Lotus Connections 2.5 realizing the benefits of Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0. IBM is bringing a comprehensive social software platform to businesses with the release of Lotus Connections 2.5.

IBM also announced a new, enterprise collaboration service – LotusLive, that delivers the benefits of cloud computing to millions of mainstream business users with the reliability, privacy and security associated with on-premise enterprise collaboration software.

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

collaboration for a range of on- or off-premise messaging capabilities, including mobile mail that interoperates with Lotus Notes and Microsoft Exchange. Available immediately, IBM's secure, cloud-based service for email, calendaring and contact management is designed to work with existing on-premise email or operate as a standalone solution to reduce overall IT costs and complexity. It is quick and simple to deploy, making it well-suited for companies of all sizes.

Lotus in India is uniquely advantaged to serve its clients better due to the large presence of technical product development and support centers locally. This fosters high quality innovation based on regional customer challenges to quickly transform into solutions that address the needs of growth market businesses.