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Friday, 18 February 2011 17:40 |
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The web based document productivity suite is really starting to heat up. Google Docs was the first to make it popular (though companies like Zoho already had similar offerings). Microsoft rather belatedly entered the arena, grumbling at the potential cannibalization of on premise MS Office revenues, but aware that it was a compulsory future strategy to have. Cisco followed recently, by offering a cloud version of its well known open source MS office alternative - Open Office. Well, since all biggies are having a party, how could IBM be left far behind? IBM recently disclosed that LotusNotes word-processing, spreadsheet and presentation products will be added to IBM’s LotusLive cloud service in the second half of 2011. This can be seen as a part of the trend of unification of messaging and collaboration tools where online productivity suite and document management solutions are being offered as a component of a larger unified communication and collaboration suite, with email, project management, intranet tools, workflows, calendars, contacts, forums and mobility as other components. Google has this with Google Apps. MS has this with Office 365. And now IBM has this with IBM LotusLive. Cisco is the only one with a confusing array of products including WebEx, WebEx Mail, WebOffice and OpenOffice. Apart from these biggies, theres are players in the SMB arena who offer similar unified offerings like HyperOffice Collaboration Suite and Zoho.
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