Gary Barnett's Blog

IBM has announced its intention to acquire a SaaS email and calendaring provider called Outblaze. The announcement is here.

This is an important announcement for two quick reasons – firstly the outblaze technology can bring added functionality to IBM’s Bluehouse platform, and secondly it signifies that IBM is pretty committed to investing in its  “big play” in the online collaboration space.

I reckon 2009 and 2010 are going to be busy years in terms of acquisitions – Steve Mills (the chap who runs IBM’s software business) has a track record of smart purchases, and while I don’t expect him to go crazy with the corporate credit card, I reckon there’ll be a few bargains that he just won’t be able to pass up in the coming two years.

I’m expecting to hear lots and lots on Bluehouse from IBM at the upcoming Lotusphere 2009. It’s very much something to watch…

What is Bluehouse?

Bluehouse (which is from the Lotus guys in IBM’s Software Group) is an online collaboration platform – that allows people to connect to eachother, share documents and form groups. It has a lot in common with Google’s “Apps”, and with other companies like Huddle.

Bluehouse was announced more or less a year ago at the 2008 LotuSphere event, and at the time I reckoned it was the most exciting announcement at the event. I signed up there and then for the beta program and have been a fairly regular visitor ever since.

Is it any good?

It will be.

At the time it was first announced I thought that Bluehouse had the potential to offer organisations an “enterprise quality” alternative to Google Apps and Facebook. That potential remains, but so far Bluehouse has been something of a “slow burn”. In order to get people excited about signing up to “yet another collaboration platform” you have to offer them something special, and BlueHouse isn’t quite there… yet.

At the moment, it feels a little like an empty Cathedral – Beautiful, Well built… but somehow “waiting”.

Bluehouse integrated with a slew of Lotus products (although I’d like the integration to be slicker)… and there’s a really good opportunity for IBM to deliver something that will provide a reliable, trusted, SaaS alternative to Microsoft’s small business server.

I’m off to Lotusphere 2009 in a couple of weeks… and I hope I’ll have a LOT more to say on the topic of Bluehouse then.

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