At Lotusphere this year, there was little in the way of rip-roaring, rousing announcements that could knock the socks off someone who was sitting there wondering what Lotus would do for their business. For the techies making up the vast majority of the audience, however, there was much to keep them happy, from details on new APIs, better integrations to external applications and services, as well as different ways of integrating social media and other external information feeds into the Lotus environment.

However, hidden somewhat under everything were many interesting indications of where IBM and Lotus are going and these details should be of interest to businesses.

Firstly, everything was being pitched as existing in a hybrid world—some technical platform and functionality would still reside in an organisation's data centre, some would be pulled in from outside sources. No mass move here for world domination, trying to persuade everyone that the data centre is dead and the future is only in the cloud. IBM will be making a big play for cloud services—but in context with how organisations are currently set up, and at a speed that matches their needs.

At one end of the scale is the agreement penned with Panasonic to move its entire employee base, along with some suppliers and partners, from in-house Microsoft Exchange to a cloud-based LotusLive mail system, gaining social networking, web conferencing, file sharing and project management tools in the process. If all goes well, IBM will gain over 300,000 users to its LotusLive environment—one that already has 18 million registered users. At the other end of the scale were the 8,000+ organisations that have switched from whatever email system they were already using to Lotus Domino in house (details were not given as to those who had migrated off a Lotus platform, unsurprisingly). What IBM is demonstrating is that no matter where an organisation is starting from, it can move the communication and collaboration platform forward to wherever the organisation feels it needs to go: in-house, hybrid or pure-play cloud.

However, nagging at me all the way through is the fact that if LotusLive has grown to 18 million users when the vast majority of people reading this will have never heard of it, how big could it have been with suitable messaging and marketing? As Microsoft continues to be the dominant player in the mid-market, and POP3 and other hosted solutions eat away at the SMB and mid-market environments, just where is IBM? If it can make an integrated platform available at reasonable cost (LotusLive can be as low as $3 per seat per month for large customers), it could and should be making big waves worldwide in the markets where it has historically been weak.

The next big play was "Project Vulcan". It gave rise to great demoware, but again, the main worry for me was that it actually would confuse the hell out of a general user. Terming the drive forwards as a play for "attention management", IBM states that Project Vulcan is not, in itself, a shop front for new products, but is there to show how existing products in conjunction with new "glue" and extra possible functionality may end up in the future. To this end, the demo showed how a user's front page to their existing Notes environment may be a stream of aggregated information pulled from e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Notes, RSS feeds and anything else—but filtered so that anything that is clearly rubbish doesnt get in the way. The demo rapidly became a "if you click here then this happens, and if you then click here, you get to here, which allows you to do this". Fantastic for people who live and breathe the technological information highways, but a potentially major turn off for those just trying to get a relatively simple job done.

However, it does show a lot of promise and, when combined with some of the other technical areas that IBM Labs have been cooking for some time (such as a BI tool called Atlas, the capability to use a search tool that can identify a single slide within a library of presentations, the capability to search for a word or phrase within a video clip), we start to see some major changes in how individuals, groups and organisations can actually approach their processes. A new refocus on mobility (a little late (or almost show-stoppingly late), from my point of view) means that higher functionality clients on RIM, iPhone and Android devices will be available, yet still in an open manner.

So, little to announce that says "IBM Lotus has a new Product Y that organisations should see as a must have". However, a lot of bedding down of existing technologies, a lot of tweaks here and there to make things easier going forwards, and a big dose of bits and pieces that show that IBM is not resting on its laurels, that it is not going to let the upstart cloud vendors take the market away from it without a fight. But, I still think that IBM runs the risk of missing major opportunities: it has to better understand the mid-market and SMB; it has to improve its marketing and messaging in these key markets, and to help do this it needs to better leverage the channel in these spaces.

IBM has been around since the 1890s. A couple of statements at the event revolved around whether IBM would appeal to the Next Gen of users. As long as it can keep itself fleet of foot and providing what the market needs, rather than trying to enforce on the market what it has available, it should be around and successful for the foreseeable future. Based on what I saw at Lotusphere, IBM should still be around—provided it gets the detail right and, in particular, at the messaging and marketing levels.