IBM unveils Lotus Center in Pune

BANGALORE, INDIA: IBM today unveiled the Lotus Center for Advanced Collaboration (LCAC).

The center, which is claimed to be the only one of its kind in Asia Pacific, is located at the IBM Software Lab in Pune and 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 and best practices from IBM Lotus collaboration offerings, and create road maps and strategies that best suit their business needs, said a press release.

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

“According to a recent CIO study, collaboration is the prime concern and the first priority for most organizations and we are best poised with our Lotus Portfolio to help clients collaborate smarter,” said the release.

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, said IBM.

Alistair Rennie, VP, Development and Technical Support, IBM said, “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 as a Linux-based appliance for small and medium business.”

Dr. Ponani Gopalakrishnan, VP, India Software Lab, IBM said the LCAC would 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 worldwide 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.