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In my recent article, I gave you some information on many of the major day one announcements at the annual Lotusphere user conference. We got to see many of the Lotus products evolve, with special attention paid to the small-to-medium (SMB) size business market. Lotus didn't forsake the enterprise market either, with several items targeting big business.

SAP and IBM Lotus Form Partnership

One of the biggest announcements at Lotusphere was the strategic partnership with SAP. Project "Atlantic" will help integrate Lotus Notes with SAP Business Suite allowing users access to various SAP functions from within the Notes client itself. Demos at Lotusphere showed the familiar form-based Notes interface tying into financial report data from SAP back-ends, as well as a side-shelf plug-in tied to expense reporting.

IBM stated that the majority of its top 100 customers also used SAP solutions, so it was a natural partnership to make. "Atlantic" should be available by the fourth quarter of 2008 and will be sold by both IBM Lotus and SAP.

This is all part of the IBM Lotus thought process that everyone lives in their email client all day long. By integrating with many different back-end systems, and surfacing their functionality within Lotus Notes, it makes users faster and more productive.

SAP CTO Vishal Sikka and IBM Lotus Software General Manager Michael Rhodin share the stage in Orlando.

Linux Support Strengthens

Lotus also made a strong commitment to Linux users with announced support for Ubuntu, Red Hat and Novell.

Ubuntu is fast becoming a user desktop of choice amongst the penguin faithful, and Lotus listened by announcing support for Lotus Notes 8 and Lotus Symphony on the platform. Ubuntu will be a fully supported Linux platform in the second half of 2008 when Lotus Notes 8.5 is released. Having a supported enterprise desktop based on Ubuntu, with free word processing, spreadsheet and presentation software, is definitely a direct attack on Microsoft.

Red Hat will see similar support by selling Lotus Notes and Lotus Symphony with the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop. Business Partners will be able to re-sell the software from both companies and Advanced Red Hat Business partners will get assistance from Red Hat with implementation services.

Red Hat is also certified to run many Lotus server products such as Domino and Sametime.

Novell reaffirmed its Lotus support with the Open Collaboration Client Solution. I discussed this back in my August article last year and since then Novell has bolstered the offering with Websphere Portal, Lotus Connections and Quickr support.

IBM Getting Aggressive with Foundations

Kind of lost in the shuffle this week was the announcement that the new Lotus Foundations product will actually be based on Linux.

First, a little background. Lotus Foundations is the product that Lotus announced for the SMB market. This software is designed to be an easy, minimal-click package that includes everything a small business might need to collaborate. The first iteration will include Lotus Domino, networking and firewall, file and print sharing, Symphony and integrated backup and restore and self-healing capabilities. Foundations will be based on a Linux back-end, so not only does Microsoft lose a possible Exchange customer, it also loses out on Office and the OS.

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