The Cloud. A lot of the technical discussion these days is about THE CLOUD. And I’m even presenting at Lotusphere 2011 this year about the Cloud — BP301 – Cloud Chasing 101: Planning and Preparing for your Move to Cloud Collaboration (Wednesday SW 1-2, 8:30-9:30 am).
While preparing for the session, I came across some interesting research that said that early adopters of cloud e-mail and collaboration technologies include higher education institutions (universities). (Gartner: “The Cloud E-Mail and Collaboration Services Market” ID G00205184). Now this is only one article. But given the numbers of universities that are not only moving their students, but faculty and staff to either Google or Microsoft cloud collaboration systems, it seems to hold some credence. Where is IBM?
In 1996, the university here had an amazing relationship with IBM. We had some opportunities to work on a digital library project, and a campus wide collaboration project (which resulted in our move to Lotus Notes/Domino). But that was fifteen years ago. Granted there has been a trickle of opportunity to participate in beta programs. But where are LotusLive iNotes and LotusLive Notes and the other LotusLive products? Has anyone from IBM knocked on the doors of universities to ask them what they need and how they can work WITH THEM to take advantage of that “early adoption.” Large universities often have more email accounts than corporate customers. Why not take advantage of that scale and have university computing science departments participate as active testers through more internships and beta programs?
I know that myself and others have brought this up numerous times. And I will be asking this at the “Ask the Product Managers” session. What is the plan for universities? Other than bringing students to Lotusphere? How are you going to engage universities in your Lotus product set? And if you have existing Lotus customers, how are you going to keep them? Or do you even care?
Marketing to the smarter planet, what about marketing to smarter customers?
Nice post… you’d think that IBM would want to be part of capturing that crowd early…
And herein lies the challenge. The individual product managers don’t make decisions about how IBM engages in the academic market. Academic Initiative and other similar programatic things are done for IBM overall, not for Notes or Sametime or LotusLive. That isn’t to say the individual product managers aren’t thinking about and championing ideas as it pertains to their products, but this is a complex business decision that involves many people who won’t be in that session.
Looks like we have our first bingo chip on “let me take that back”.
Then bottom line… it’s not being done, it’s not getting done, and seats continue to bleed away to Microsoft and Google.
I sense our first new session for LS12 – Ask the Academic Initiative peeps.
@Ed and therein lies the problem. So many decisions that directly affect the future of Lotus are made by those outside Lotus.
Perhaps the AskthePMs session could be recorded and selected parts (the ‘we can’t answer that here’ bits) passed up the chain?
Speculation: Could it be that with so many initiatives coming out of IBM and IBM Lotus, that there simply is not enough manpower to “focus” (probably bad word choice) on markets like this and others? Just in Ohio, there are close to 200 colleges and universities.
I am aware of the seats going to MS and google in the academic segment.
I might turn this around in a way that Marie won’t like. How important is student email in 2011? Most students entering university today already have a free personal email mailbox. I would be interested to hear what the utilization rate and volume is from the typical academic student mail system in 2011. Is there someplace in the academic industry where I can find that information?
It might help me understand what opportunity we’ve *really* missed vs. perceived.
Ed – Students arrive on campus with their own email accounts. And they are not the “power users” of email at universities. Universities use email now more and more as THE official form of communication, so students have official university accounts, whether they be on systems like Notes/Domino or Google/MS. But they are typically university managed as students change personal accounts almost daily. Universities want to maintain those accounts well beyond the time the student is on campus as a source of contact for continuing education and alumni activities and funding. What is the missed opportunity – is the faculty and staff – both with email and colloboration. Faculty who were primarily email centric for communication are now looking at social networking and systems like Google that include Google Docs and other sharing technologies built in, so that they can share information quickly and securely with their research colleagues around the world. And they have terrabytes if not pedabytes of storage to maintain due to research histories. So some are reluctant to go to cloud systems they may not perceive as being secure or where they may not maintain their data for the life of their academic careers. Educause is one source of data as is the Chronicle of Higher Education, but I can certainly track down others.
I thought there was more to lotuslive than Email? Understood Marie the way students as future in the working process could like the social or other parts of it.
@Ed – Here are 3 posts I did on University of Dayton, Lotus, and GMail.
Why the focus on email? Why why why? Contrary to what many think—and I can’t believe how often this has to be repeated—Notes and Domino are way more than email, and Lotus was about “collaborative applications” way before Connections (and useful web applications when Websphere was still languishing at v3).
Google apps for domains is way more than just “GMail”, just as the MS offerings give us more than a re-badged Hotmail.
So student email might not be very important at all. But that doesn’t mean Lotus should be out of the picture, surely?
@Ben , @Andreas, I agree, there is way more to the cloud than email. And we have had discussions about the student value of other parts of LotusLive. About all I can say at this point is I hear you.
Wish Sean Poulley and co took part in these conversations.
Ed, we know you hear us (and thank goodness you do…), but do others?
Who is in charge of the Academic Initiative? Could we organise a conf call from Lotusphere where the folks involved with higher education get a chance to raise their concerns?
A good person to talk to is Bob McDonald, VP of Lab Services within this division. I’ll send him a link to this thread.
Ed, before Christmas we had a meeting with an IBM rep. This was the first contact we’d had with IBM for about four years. Based on our previous experience of ‘engagement’, I told my manager that the rep would turn up with somebody from the Websphere side of the business. Guess what happened?
In fairness to the guys, unlike previous meetings they didn’t try and push websphere and listened to us. Something that hasn’t previously happened. So this is a definite improvement. Unfortunately, I suspect that this will only last last until the next shuffle because I don’t believe a real structure is there to support UK Education.
Contrast this ‘support’ to the continued support of the education market by Apple. Two weeks ago I attended a European ‘summit’. An excellent day and Apple had managed to entice a number of Pro Vice Chancellors to the event. (see: http://blog.pahudson.net/archives/358). What did Apple get out of this? On the surface, nothing. But they’d managed to preach to senior managers in European Universities – ‘Universities are changing and Apple have the tools’.
In recent years, I’ve attended similar events from Google and Microsoft and guess which cloud services the majority of of UK Universities have or are moving to.
Imagine for a moment if college grads hitting the job market already had some familiarity with LotusLive and other IBM solutions. Wouldn’t that be… nah, nevermind.