35: Sales and Evangelism at Lotus – The Vice President’s View (with Sandy Carter)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:12:36 — 66.5MB)

Episode 35, recorded Wednesday 20th and Thursday 21st January 2011, discussing Sandy’s new Sales and Evangelism VP roles, plans for 2011, her involvement in Lotusphere and more.  We then move onto a discussion about IBM’s 4Q10 figures, Lotusphere events, the return of the XCast and more…

Hosts

Stuart McIntyre (blog | twitter | company) & Darren Duke (blog | twitter | company)

Guests

Sandy Carter (blog | twitter) is Vice President, Social Business and Collaboration Solutions Sales and Evangelism, where she is responsible for setting the direction for IBM’s Social Business initiative, working with companies who are becoming Social Businesses, and being the evangelist for the concept and best practices around Social Business.

Kathy Mandelstein (twitter) is currently oversees worldwide marketing programs, web and events in IBM Software Group for the Lotus portfolio of collaboration tools designed to empower people to be more effective, responsive and innovative within the context of the work they do. It includes email, calendar, instant messaging, electronic forms, web conferencing, portals, team spaces, business dashboards, document management, and enterprise social software. Previously Kathy led the IBM Rational marketing team focused on the business value of effective software delivery.

Paul Withers (blog | twitter | company) leads the Domino Development Team at Intec Systems Ltd, an IBM Business Partner in UK. Co-presenting session at Lotusphere XPages: Enter The Dojo, Tuesday 3:30pm.

Topics

A two-part episode, first a 20-minute interview with Sandy Carter.  We covered:

New role at IBM – VP IBM Social Business and Social Solutions Sales and Evangelism

  • ‘IBM Social Business and Social Solutions’?  Can you describe what this includes?   
  • Sales and Evangelism?  Wow thats a tough combination…
    • Unusual to see a VP focused on Evangelism?  Will you continue to blog and tweet in the new role?
    • Lotus has seen a good long run of quarterly growth, then a few quarters that have been tough in a generally low market.  How do you see 2011 going? (will not ask you directly about Q4 figures, if you want to mention them then great…)
    • Will we see the yellow boxing gloves return? 😉 (i.e. will you look to take the fight to the competition)
  • Previously (before your role with partners) you were VP  Websphere.  What differences have you found coming across to Lotus?
  • Have you been surprised by the ‘community’aspect of Lotus, or are there similar communities around the other IBM brands?

Lotusphere 2011

  • What are your expectations for Lotusphere 2011?
  • Are you speaking at the OGS or other sessions?
  • Looking forward, If you had a message for the Lotus community as we get into 2011, what would it be?

We then spoke to Kathy and Paul, covering:

IBM/Lotus Q4 results

Lotusphere 2011

TWiL Live at Lotusphere

  • Wednesday 5:45-6:45 in Swan Pelican
  • Guests – Kathy Mandelstein, Mary Beth Raven, Bruce Elgort, Paul Mooney, Alan Lepofsky

RAID Explained via water coolers

The XCast relaunches

  • First new episode up, talking about Lotusphere (what else!) sessions etc.
  • Hosted by David Leedy, Tim Clark and Paul Withers
  • David’s XPages Cheatsheet updated – will be available at Lotusphere
  • XPages book

Lotus UX Team issued 26 patents in 2010

  • You either like patents or you hate them. IBM *loves* them….
  • Hopefully we’ll see some improved UI in Lotus products
  • Visit UX Lab at LS11(Dolphin Asia 4)

Symphony Fix Pack 1 released

  • Unrelated – Quickr Connector for Symphony 3 released
  • Supports QuickrD 8.5, QuickrJ 8.5 and ECM 1.1
  • Supports Symphony 1.3, 3.0 and Notes embedded (8.5.1 and 8.5.2)
  • Win XP, Vista and 7

Connections Administration Tool Now Available

  • Much needed GUI for managing Lotus Connections environments
  • Produced by TimeToAct group

First tranch of Lotus Awards announced

  • Congratulations to winners announced thus far: Silanis, Ascendant, Ascendant, iEnterprises, Trilog Group, Fritz & Macziol, and Polycom; and to finalists Tungle, Applicable, Prolifics, Rigelsoft, Ascendant, GEDYS IntraWare, Brookstone Technologies, EdifiXio, Silanis, GROUP Business Software, iEnterprises, Plantronics, and KMSLab.

Tips

Darren

Buy the books!

Kathy

Use the Lotusphere Social Aggregator!

Paul

EntwicklerCamp, 21st-23rd Feb in Gelsenkirchen, Germany. Lots of great speakers, Maureen Leland doing keynote, loads of XPages sessions including two from me (XPages Blast, by kind permission of Matt White and Tim Clark, and XPages from a Difference View-point, updated and extended)

Stuart

Not so much a tip, more a request.  Need a SIM card for the US that gives 3G data (no calls) at decent rates, say by buying a bundle of 2GB etc. Any suggestions?

29: Ignore the watercooler and be like an ostrich – your head is in the sand and your backside is in the air

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:32:31 — 84.7MB)

Episode 29, recorded Thursday 2nd December 2010, discussing Enterprise 2.0, collaboration styles, evangelism, Twitter’s effect on community behaviour and more…

Please note: we have started to put times in the show notes for when we start to discuss each topic, in order to make it easier to fast-forward through the show to the topics that are of particular interest.  If you would like us to produce an enhanced podcast (AAC format) version of the show with multiple chapters to cover the individual chapters, please do let us know.

Also, we have made the decision to move to recording this show on Thursdays from this point forward, in order to allow additional time to get the podcast produced and still release on a Friday in time for the commute home (in Europe and America at least). Hope this meets with your approval!

This does mean that in this case we recorded before the first Lotusphere abstract confirmations were emailed out late on Thursday – we mentioned this on the podcast…

Hosts

Stuart McIntyre (blog | twitter | company) & Darren Duke (blog | twitter | company)

Guests

Luis Suarez (blog | twitter) has been working at IBM for the last 13 years, specialising in the areas of Knowledge Management, Collaboration, Community Building, Learning and Social Computing / Enterprise 2.0. He is currently working as a Social Computing Evangelist within the Software Group, under the BlueIQ team, with the joint mission of helping accelerate the adoption of social software within IBM. In my spare time, I took on the challenge of living “A World Without Email”nearly three years ago, ditching corporate email and instead relying more heavily on social software tools.

Susan Scrupski (linkedin | facebook | twitter) is founder and Executive Director of The 2.0 Adoption Council, a Dachis Group company. The 2.0 Adoption Council is a peer-based, information-sharing private community interested in the latest concepts, best practices, case studies, and helpful tips associated with executing socio-collaborative strategies and projects in the large enterprise.  Susan has been analyzing the IT Services market for 20  years, with her insights having been featured in industry research, as well as mainstream media such as The New York Times, Businessweek, The Wall Street Journal, and CNBC. Her interests are in Enterprise 2.0 and the next generation web. Susan is on the advisory board of the Enterprise 2.0 Conference, blogs for the Enterprise Irregulars, and spends most of her time supporting the council members in their efforts to evangelize social business in their own organizations.

Luis Benitez (blog | twitter ) is one of the Social Software Product Managers at IBM.  He’s been with IBM for 9 years and loves to promote the concept of accelerating innovation in the workplace by socializing.

Topics

Luis Suarez – Enterprise 2.0 Internal Evangelist of the year (03:58) 

  • Congratulations
  • What does it mean, who awarded it?
  • What was the prize?
  • What do you do inside IBM?

What is ‘Enterprise2.0’? (14:14) 

  • There are lots of terms being introduced – Enterprise2.0, Social Computing, Social Media, Social Collaboration, now IBM is pushing Social Business (seems to be the key theme for Lotusphere) – What is special about Social Business?
  • Do organisations get it?
  • Do you need the right corporate culture to allow Enterprise2.0 to thrive?
  • Do we need to do more to make the transition more obvious for ‘traditional companies’or those with ‘traditional working styles’?

‘Evangelism’(43:57) 

  • Why do we need to evangelise about technology?
  • Were there ‘email evangelists’or ‘CRM evangelists’? Or is ‘evangelism’new to Social Computing?
  • Should we be having fun at work?
  • If someone ‘gets’Enterprise2.0 (or social computing) and wants to promote its use in organisations, how do they go about it?
  • If someone wants to promote use of other technologies (say XPages, or CRM), are the techniques broadly similar?

Twitter ‘is a severely anti-social means of communication.‘ (1:07:20) 

  • ‘It engenders terrible behavior among people who would otherwise be at least cordial, if not outright friends. It affects our message. It makes us segregated. It makes us mean. It makes us bullies.’
  • Discuss!

Lotusphere 2011 coming soon (1:20:14) 

  • What would make Lotusphere more social?
  • What can we learn from other conferences?

Domino Collaboration Express to allow clustering from Ed Brill (1:23:05) 

Tips (1:24:16)

DarrenNeed to back up a ESX or ESXi VM? Trilead is a good way to do one time backups for free, or a very well priced option for scheduled backups for only 690 USD, 520 EUR or 450 GBP .
Luis SFollowing further previous tip on #elsuapps, folks need to check out SoundNote (Amazing iPad App for less than 5$!)
SusaniPhone TripIt app
LuisBAndroid (CMIS) client for LC 3.0
StuartBook for Lotusphere today! Even if you hope to get a session…
Also, great presentation on Slideshare A to Z – The 26 Most Essential Websites For Entrepreneurs

20: IBM’s reputation, connecting via Sametime and following Tiger’s women

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:11:34 — 65.7MB)

Episode 20, recorded Friday 1st October 2010, discussing the IBM’s reputation for social software, contacting IBM employees via Sametime and more…

Hosts

Stuart McIntyre (blog | twitter | company)  & Darren Duke (blog | twitter | company)

Guests

Luis Benitez (blog | twitter) is one of the Social Software Product Managers for IBM effective today.  Prior to this new role Luis was the Lotus Social Software evangelist for the Americas and leads the internal Lotus Social Software community with over 2000 members.
Matt Simpson (blog/podcast | twitter | company | profile) is an Initiative Leader in the IBM CIO Organization, responsible for Sametime deployments in IBM.  His background is socio-technical, especially focusing on collaboration and knowledge management.

Topics

IBM could be bigger than Facebook – Luis Benitez post 

  • Fast Company article ‘Fathoming a new product from IBM via a launch event is like trying to understand the ocean by watching a wave. Nonetheless that was my task, swimming through the presentations and ultimately landing an interview with Jeffrey Schick, IBM’s VP of Social Software. Drenched in the vision Schick shared for the IBM Customer Experience Suite, it occurred to me that IBM could end up being more important to the business use and monetization of social media than Facebook.’
  • ‘Long before Mark Zuckerberg aggregated his Harvard friends online, IBM’ers could find their colleagues in a similar manner. According to Schick, “at IBM 15 years ago, we had a way to look up people to create a globally connected enterprise.” “Today we have approximately 500,000 people within IBM and we do about 6 million look ups a day on pages that look strikingly similar to other social network profile pages with features like blogging and photo posting,” added Schick.’
  • What does the article mean? Is IBM cool now? 😉

Jon Mell is back at IBM 

  • From Headshift to be North IOT Sales lead for Portal, Connections etc.
  • First notable name to rejoin IBM/Lotus after lots of folks have left (Alan Lepofsky, Gia Lyons, Rocky Oliver, Bob Balaban etc)
  • Does IBM need to hire more big industry names?

Luis also has a new role – moving into product management 

  • What prompted the change?
  • What did you learn from doing it in the real world that will now help in product management?
  • There’s a few IBM social software product managers, where will you fit?

Sametime ExtST service 

  • What is it?  http://ibm.com/collaboration is a site on ibm.com through which people can access many ways to collaborate with IBMers.  Within that service, there is a pilot of a way to Sametime with IBMers.  Today, it is an as-is service with minimal support.  Soon, it will be upgraded with refreshed hardware and software as well as full-production support.
  • Some history…
  • So what’s IBM doing about it?  In Q3, we recognized the priority for this service and included it into our Fall Plan for 2010 funding.  This year, we have launched a project to upgrade the service.  We have developed an environment with the latest Sametime 8.5.1 software, and plan to deploy it in Q4.
  • What’s been done so far?  For several years, a pilot / as-is best-effort service has been in place.  Priority to deploy a production service was established in late 2009.  A project has kicked off in 2010 to deploy the new service by end of year.
  • What’s planned?  When will it be launched?  A new service will be online in Q4 2010 which will include a help desk and the ability to use the latest Sametime clients.
  • What does this mean for customers and BPs?  Once deployed, this means that BPs will be able to use the latest code to Sametime with IBMers.
  • Lotus Notes Traveler the “fastest-growing business mobile email platform”- Ed Brill

Lotus Symphony 3 beta 4 pimped on BNET – Ed Brill 

  • Where’s Oracle?
  • How will the forking affect this?
  • What’s next Symphony IdeaJam launched
  • Looking forward to a TWiL episode focused on Symphony 3 launch

Lotusphere Registration has opened 

ILoveLotusNotes.net launch

Tips

Darren: TriStateLUG (October 11, New York City, Keven Cavanaugh doing keynote)

Luis:  Lotus Connections Plug-ins for Symphony: (Org Chart generator, wiki editor, LotusLive Files connector.. and readily available for Symphony 3)

Matthew: Lotus Connections Status Alerts Plug-In for Lotus Notes, available from the Lotus Catalog.

Stuart: Self-registration database for Lotus Quickr and Connections. Enables the request, provision, authorisation and management of accounts for external users of on-premise deployments of IBM Social tools.