IBM Brings Business-Grade Social Software to iPhone, Macs

SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 11 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Macworld -- IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced it is delivering business-grade collaboration and social software for use with the iPhone, iPod Touch or Macintosh computers.

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Organizations can now use IBM software for enterprise social networking; instant messaging; and securely encrypted email and collaborative applications with the iPhone and Mac.  

The new software includes Lotus Symphony 3.0, IBM's office productivity suite, which is now available on the Mac,  providing spreadsheets, presentations and documents free of charge. In addition, new offerings for the iPhone and Mac include Lotus Connections and Lotus Sametime, which customers can use to build professional networks with social capabilities such as blogs, wikis, activities and microblogging, as well as instant messaging capabilities.  

Today's news underscores IBM's commitment to expanding its software to support the increasing global mobile work force and popular consumer devices. Today, IBM delivers the broadest range of business-class software for mobile devices, ranging from e-commerce, email and now social software. General Motors, for example, relies on IBM collaboration software to increase the agility of its work force through a wide range of mobile devices, including the iPhone.

Analysts estimate that mobile devices will exceed personal computers by 2013 with global shipments of mobile devices growing 46 percent to more than 250 million in 2010.  

IBM's Lotus Social Software can help users share and discover expertise and content instantly, harnessing the wisdom of the crowds. IBM has seen increased enterprise adoption with recognized clients such as Colgate-Palmolive, HSBC, the United Nations, Union-Pacific Railroad, SunLife, ACI, Sogeti, and NEC.

IBM Sametime brings voice, video, online meetings, enterprise instant messaging and community collaboration to the iPhone and Mac.  It lowers telephony costs, saves money on Web conferencing services and increases the tempo of business. Leading companies such as Southern California Edison and Verizon rely on IBM Sametime.

IBM is delivering the broadest collaboration capabilities to mobile users worldwide    

IBM is the first to deliver securely encrypted email and collaborative applications to help streamline the way people work with Lotus Notes and Domino Software for Mac and iPhone. Developers can mobilize existing Domino business applications on to devices with xPages through a rapid application development model.  

Lotus Notes and Domino software is used by the top nine aerospace and defense organizations; the top nine automotive firms; the top eight banks; the top four makers of consumer products; the top seven electronics firms; the top eight insurance companies; the top seven pharmaceutical organizations; and the top nine telecommunications carriers.

With Symphony for the Mac, IBM is unveiling the new Lotus Symphony 3.0 beta productivity software and its new features. Symphony provides documents, spreadsheets and presentations and supports most Microsoft Office features. The new return on investment calculator demonstrates the cost savings companies can achieve by switching to Symphony from other costly office productivity suites. More than 12 million people have downloaded Symphony for business and consumer use of its documents, presentation files and spreadsheets.

"A mobile workforce that can tap into the insights and assets of the entire organization is essential to IBM's vision for a Smarter Planet," said Alistair Rennie, general manager, IBM Lotus Software. "That's why we're delivering all forms of collaboration securely and reliably across the most popular devices to transform the way people want to work together."

IBM will demonstrate many of the new capabilities it is bringing to Apple products at Macworld Booth 1284.

Business Partner Support for Customized Lotus Software on Personal Devices

Many IBM partners have developed solutions based on IBM Lotus technology which are available today in the Apple App Store.  For example, SNAPPS has created SnappFiles for IBM Lotus Quickr, available for download free of charge. Users can access their Quickr places and files directly from their iPhone or iPod Touch, without any modifications to a user's server.  

Elguji Software's IQJam, a question and answer community solution powered by IBM Lotus Domino and xPages technology, helps organizations capitalize on the knowledge of their employees. IQJam allows people to identify who the subject-matter experts are by keeping track of answered questions and associating them with categories, or IQSpaces, and tags.  

ITANA enables users to access Lotus Notes Tasks and Notebook from the iPhone. iEnterprises brings its wireless application Mobile Edge to companies that would like to mobilize Lotus Notes applications, CRM systems and other business applications on the Apple iPhone, or the iPad. The turnkey solution enables iPhone users to quickly access and update their contacts, opportunities and other CRM information as well as their existing Lotus Notes applications to their iPhone.

SOURCE IBM