Category Lotusphere Lotusphere2010 LS10
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Bob is back now, and is talking about partners, and "beating the competition".

He's mentioning the "Lotus Knows...." marketing campaign. I have to say that, for me personally, this is one of the most successful marketing efforts that Lotus has embarked upon in a long, long time. I hope they keep it up, and I'd love to see a "bigger footprint" in the marketing effort, such as TV.

Bob has become a good speaker as well - a lot better than some of his predecessors (Zollar, anyone? Or Jeanette?)

Gained 18,378 new customers last year, according to Bob. But what does that really mean?

He's mentioning Symphony, and the productivity it gives to people for free. BETA for newest version of Symphony will be available next month. That's good, I've heard good things about the newest version. I mean, it won't be WordPro, or even AmiPro (man, I miss them ), but it is still a helluva lot better than MS Office.

"Collaboration Agenda" - get greater productivity from people and partners. Disruptive technology can be used for a competitive advantage, starting today. Used to identify gaps, and then you can better empower people to overcome and "fill those gaps". It can even help with company-to-company collaboration, a sorely underserved space.

Now he's talking about their vertical marketing push in a way where you can get solutions that are more focused on your specific industry. Duh, that's vertical markets. I like working vertical markets - it tends to be very profitable. However I'm not sure about having my platform vendor being the vertical vendor, as that space should be left to the platform vendor's partners. Now, if they are about enabling the partners to better serve the verticals, then fine; but if they're there to compete against their own customers, then that would be a problem. I know it may appear that this isn't likely, but hey - it's happened before...

More to come...

Rock