Last week at Lotosphere 2010, IBM announced Project Vulcan which Ed Brill, IBM chief of product management for Lotus software, describes as:

IBM Project Vulcan is not a brand-new effort.  It builds on the existing capabilities, and represents the future versions of, the IBM Lotus product portfolio — including Notes.  One of its key themes is social analytics and business analytics combined and applied to industry-specific scenarios — making collaboration more focused and relevant.  The vision of Project Vulcan intends to deliver collaboration across company boundaries; make it easy to deploy the technology; and include developer-friendly services and APIs.

Moreover, Mr. Brill says that:

Project Vulcan is the blueprint for where Lotus Notes is going.  We’ll continue to support your existing Notes apps — we have for 20 years, it only makes sense to continue — but we’ll add these loosely-coupled services to bring in more value, attention, and focus.  Project Vulcan gives us a structure for innovation, for delivering on that next leap forward in collaboration and productivity.

During their mini-keynote address, Ed Brill, director of product management for Lotus Software, and Kevin Cavanaugh, vice president of messaging and collaboration, said the Notes entry point to Vulcan comes in 2011 after the 8.5.2 release.

So we now have a new player on the scene offering a collection of business collaboration tools. Moreover, IBM is taking a page from Google and offering the ability for developers to sign up at the LotusLive Labs website. Project Vulcan is scheduled to be available in beta on the LotusLive Labs in the second half of 2010. I have already signed up and am really looking forward to getting my “invite”. Obviously, IBM is hoping that the LotusLive Labs preview of Project Vulcan will offer some of the similar hype that Google Wave experienced. Moreover, some valuable user feedback.

Similar to what we wrote about Novell Pulse it becomes clear that Google must announce their business solution soon. Even if it just as IBM has done – Saying this is the direction we are developing toward. If they do not, they are risking that others that already have a larger footprint in the business area then they do will start to define that space before (and for) them. Thus, folks will be getting excited about what is to come from them and not about where Google is going with Google Wave.

I think  Novell Pulse and Project Vulcan is exciting and I can hardly wait to see those products and play with them. But, I would love hear from Google about their vision of how they see Google Wave, Google Voice and Google Apps all fitting together in the future…and when they think that future will be.

What do you think about this announcement from IBM? Will you be signing up in the LotusLive Labs and be giving Project Vulcan a try? Leave your thoughts below.

photos by Fabio Pignatti

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