Businesses are realising that there is a tremendous amount of experience and knowledge within their own organisations that they need to embrace and leverage – the challenge is identifying and unlocking this information. Cloud Computing allows applications and services to surface more effectively which in turn offers 1. Flexibility & Scalability 2. Cost Savings 3. Focus on core competencies.
LotusLive Notes now lets you collaborate more effectively via the cloud.
See Unified Communications specialist Matt Paddon explain how LotusLive Notes helps you collaborate using cloud computing.
Cloud Computing Vodcast Transcript
Valerie Khoo: Cloud computing is starting to have an impact on the way businesses deploy and use software. We're talking to collaboration specialist Matt Padden of IBM. Matt for those who still aren’t sure what exactly is cloud computing?
Matt Padden: Well cloud computing is a means of delivering computer services, where the underlying technology and infrastructure is almost invisible to an organisation. So traditionally organisations have got large departments who are running their infrastructure, running their servers, running their bandwidth and their networking, but now with cloud computing all of that infrastructure is actually outsourced into a data centre.
Valerie Khoo: I believe one of the key benefits of cloud computing is the ability to work from anywhere now, like this café for instance?
Matt Padden: Absolutely one of the benefits of cloud computing is you can now have access to your customers to your business partners and to your organisation from anywhere, with a secure Internet access, I can access my organisation from anywhere.
Valerie Khoo: So what are most organisations looking for when it comes to cloud computing?
Matt Padden: Organisations are looking for different things depending on their role. So the CEO as a good example is looking to gain a competitive advantage through innovation, the CFO is looking for profitability and growth, for visibility into what IT the organisation is running and the CIO is looking for a reliable system but also looking for early user adoption for these technologies.
Valerie Khoo: From a collaborations perspective then, what trends are you seeing?
Matt Padden: It's interesting because in the consumer space we're seeing a lot of technologies now being used, technologies like Linked In and My Space and Facebook now these social software technologies are playing a really big part now in the enterprise space. What that’s allowing businesses to do, is to find people within their organisations and also externally, to collaborate with and meet their business objectives.
Valerie Khoo: IBM's Lotus has released a range of award winning online tools. What does the Lotus Live portfolio now allow you to do?
Matt Padden: Well the Lotus live portfolio is split into three different areas. The first is messaging, so that’s purely email, calendaring and contact. The second is collaboration and the third is web conferencing. What we can see here is the Lotus Live home page and this is as we talked about earlier gives everybody all the information they need about what Lotus Live is, what the capabilities are plus a 30 day free trial which allows people to actually test the software itself. So let's actually go and have a look at exactly what Lotus live is and what it does. So here you can see my Lotus Live dashboard as you can see there's my picture with my name and my role and responsibility within the organisation, plus on the left hand side you can see the index. Here you can see Lotus Live meetings, this gives me the ability to manage, set up and host a web conference. Next you can see events this gives me the ability to create and manage webinars. So my network allows me to find people inside or outside my organisation depending on their role or their expertise. So very much a look up and find the right person to do business with. Next there's files, so files allows us to collaborate around documents. So I can now not only store files within Lotus Live but I can also send and share content through these documents and files with other people, inside and outside my organisation. Here we have activities that allow the entire team to stay in touch through a project. Forms and charts allow me to go out and create surveys and also to provide information in different charts and different formats. Then there's instant messaging instant messaging is key to unified user communication experience.
Valerie Khoo: What are the key benefits of collaboration in the cloud and how does Lotus live enable you to do it?
Matt Padden: Well firstly it's important to realise and remember that IBM has been hosting for 40-50 years so we certainly have the experience. The other benefits and the other key differentiators for Lotus Live is security, it's built on business grade security, obviously the cost is very low and with Lotus Live it's subscription licensing so it's per user per month. Flexibility is key as well, so organisations can now pick and choose exactly what technologies, what collaborative technologies that they're after. They can also leverage these new collaborative technologies such as social software and they can do it today. They don’t need to wait; it's all there in the cloud ready to access right now.
Valerie Khoo: What should someone do if they are interested in finding out more about these technologies?
Matt Padden: Well certainly lotuslive.com is the first port of call. I'd encourage anybody to go and look and find out a little bit more about Lotus Live. Also there's a thirty day free trial so organisations, whether it's email, whether it’s the collaboration tool's we've talked about or whether it's web conferencing they can have thirty days to actually try this technology and see how it can benefit their business.
End of Transcript