Cage Fighter – Bruce
(flickr)

IBM Lotus Vice President of Unified Communications and Collaboration, Bruce Morse called out Microsoft at the Enterprise 2.0 (E2) conference in San Francisco earlier this week. The Demo Gods weren’t with IBM that day.  After suffering through a very glitchy demo presumably caused by an overloaded conference network (hey, we’ve all been there), he declared:

“Trust me, this stuff works. We use it every day in business and we have a lot of customers who’ve deployed it,” he said. “But obviously we’re having a bit of difficulty I presume with the network today.”

“I’m here today to tell you I’m not afraid to get in the cage with Microsoft – in their closed cage,” said Morse. “And so, I’d like to issue a challenge today for Microsoft at VoiceCon in the spring, to put up or shut up. I’ll be willing to match up our capabilities against Microsoft and let the audience judge.”

In order to differentiate itself from Microsoft, IBM Lotus is enabling its customers to leverage their existing communication infrastructure by integrating with Lotus Notes and Sametime. It is great to see IBM taking the offensive and I can’t wait for VoiceCon 2010 to witness the public solution shootout – cage or no cage.

Microsoft, are you biting…?

Cisco announced today at its Collaboration Summit the launch of new enterprise collaboration products that further round out its already strong portfolio of IP telephony, real-time collaboration and media server solutions.  The new products include hosted email and social networking for the enterprise and puts Cisco in direct competition with Microsoft, IBM, Google and many other start-ups.

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I have been using voice mail transcription from Simulscribe/PhoneTag for over two years and couldn’t image life without it. The premise is simple: Instead of listening to lengthy voice messages, having to jot down phone numbers etc., I quickly scan through a SMS or email and get the information I need, or simply hit delete on things I don’t.  PhoneTag’s transcription works very well, but can cost up to $30/month if you get a lot of voice mails.

The lure of  “free” made me check out Google Voice and its built-in transcription.

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Peek, the company that makes a no-thrills mobile email-only device, just released the TwitterPeek, a gadget that does nothing but allow you to send and receive tweets. Seriously? At a time where cellphones have become HD movie playing, video recording gaming consoles with built-in GPS, The People want a dedicated twitter device?

A recent ethical phishing experiment shows a surprising 100% success rate on bypassing anti-spam filters. The experiment highlights how simple, small-scale spear-phishing campaigns easily bypass corporate security filters and that users continue to take the bait.

This scenario was an invitation from Linkedin, posing as an invitation from Bill Gates to join his network. Linkedin was selected due to availability, and the fact that it is a social network recognized by most executives. This selection of Linkedin was also based on the fact that linked-in email should be already identified by most existing email system(s), and this may have helped delivery through into the mailbox.

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Some interesting analysis from the Gartner IT Symposium in Orlando last week.  Gartner expects 20% of corporate email seats to be either SaaS- or cloud-based by 2012.

The transition is well under way and is led naturally by smaller organizations, but larger enterprises are following.  The decision to move email into the cloud is mainly based on the promise of 50% savings.

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