IBM Middle East launches new messaging and collaboration platform at GITEX 2005

With these new product offerings, IBM has created a vastly improved collaboration platform designed to meet the evolving and expanding needs of knowledge workers. Lotus Domino 7 also includes new collaboration features and tools that can help improve productivity for IT administrators and corporate application developers, as well as significant new productivity enhancements to help Lotus Notes users work more efficiently.

"IBM recognizes that our customers in this region need more than just email for their collaboration needs- the combined features of Lotus Notes and Lotus Domino provide an extensive platform built to meet the business objectives of a wide variety of corporate communities, including end-users, IT administrators, application developers and the CFO's office," said Bashar Kilani, software group manager, IBM Middle East, Egypt and Pakistan. "The development of these new Lotus offerings has been driven by double-digit growth and over 500 competitive customer wins in the first half of 2005. We expect this momentum to continue with our new offerings that promise to increase productivity from the organizational level down to individual knowledge workers."

End-user productivity is a driving factor in companies' uses of collaboration software, and with Lotus Notes 7 users will benefit from over 120 new features that will allow them to manage an increasing volume of information and work more efficiently. New visual indicators can help users organize and manage their in-box by highlighting high priority messages, as well as differentiating between group emails and messages targeted for specific users.

New memory functions will automatically save and return to open documents and applications upon shut down and restart, which will give users additional mobility without worrying about losing data or hindering productivity. And instant messaging and presence technology, already integrated in the Lotus Notes client, has been expanded across the platform, including emails and calendar items, facilitating productivity and responsiveness by instantly connecting users with experts and key contacts.

Lotus Notes and Domino 7, a key component of the IBM(R) Workplace™ strategy, marks a major milestone in IBM's product roadmap for the Lotus product family. Customers have indicated that a critical factor when choosing a software platform is a reliable, long-term product plan that won't require additional software purchases or major migrations to upgrade.

IBM is helping customers plan their software purchases and deployments by delivering new versions of Lotus Notes and Domino every 12-18 months and making it simple for customers to upgrade to new versions. As a result, IBM's clear product roadmap and consistent delivery of new Lotus Notes and Domino technology has resulted in more than 90% of customers working on the most recent1 version of the product, which is an unprecedented rate of adoption in the software industry.

Server and Application Development Features Help Customers Increase Efficiency, Contain Costs

In addition to increased end-user functionality, Lotus Notes and Domino 7 extends IBM's leadership in providing tools and functionality for IT administrators and application developers that can optimize the value of the Lotus Notes and Domino platform while leveraging existing skills and investments.

Lotus Domino 7 also includes new tools for application developers. According to customer feedback, over 65% of IBM customers are building as many or more Lotus Domino-based applications this year than one year ago, and the number is predicted to increase with the improved development capabilities in Lotus Domino 7. However, these customers have indicated a need to protect their investment in Lotus Domino-based applications as they move closer to Web services-oriented architectures. To help meet this need, IBM has upgraded the Lotus Domino 7 toolset to expand the reach of Lotus Domino applications while protecting their investment in Lotus Domino-based applications. For example, a new Web services design element lets developers use Lotus Domino as a Web services host, giving customers the benefits of extending Lotus Domino applications as open, standards-based Web services.

Additionally, Lotus Notes and Domino 7 also provides developers with the option of using either traditional NSF storage features or IBM DB2 as the foundation for new and existing applications. This new capability gives developers the option of leveraging open-standard SQL (Structured Query Language) and choosing the technology that best fits their skills and business needs.

New IT administration tools can increase performance and scalability while helping to lower costs. Through internal benchmarking, IBM projects that this release will allow many customers to run up to 50 percent more users per server, requiring up to 25 percent less CPU capacity for the same workload. In addition,
new autonomic monitoring tools and the inclusion of Tivoli Analyzer technology can save customers money by automatically alerting administrators to potential performance issues before they occur, helping administrators maximize their IT resources and avoiding costly server crashes and downtime.