Lotusphere 2010 Monday

It's been a pretty long time since my last blog post - I guess Lotusphere is just the right time to start again. So what's happening in Disney World? Weather is great, 70F, it's awesome to be here and see everyone again. Hey, where was everyone at JellyRoles yesterday night? :-)

Today's big event was of course the Opening General Session of Lotusphere 2010. The guest speaker William Shatner was just pure brilliant - and everyone in the room very excited... geeks... ;-)

What Bob Picciano and Alistair Rennie announced afterwards was partly interesting, partly exciting, but not (yet) the *bang* that would be expected for the Opening General Session. The announcements included news about:

- an improved Quickr that got more integrated with Notes
- Notes Traveler Companion now being available in the App Store
- 18.700 and some new customers since Notes 8
- Connections gone mobile
- the improved vertical approach to the market
- LotusLive having more than 18 Mio Users
- Lotus Connections becoming part of LotusLive in Q3
- LotusLive Notes being planned for spring
- Lotus Live Labs for partners being planned for Q2

And then, nearly towards the end, it came - the big bang: Project Vulcan

Ron Sebastian and Suzanne Minassian showed us what we can expect: a whole new "application", built on loosly coupled systems, that seems to have Notes as its center point, with LotusLive'ish applications integrated, reminding of Google Wave, but seeming to be - at least in the vision - already ahead. At this point it looks great, and I must admit my first thought was "I want to work with that". I am pretty excited about this move and most people here at Lotusphere seem to share this feeling.

Ed Brill writes: "... that leap is going to leave everyone else in the dust" - read more about Project Vulcan in his blog.