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Over the last few days, I’ve seen a fair few electrons displaced over IBM’s announcements about Lotus Connections and Quickr (Dion points to an ITNews article which sums it up reasonably well), and while there’s some interesting discussions about their pros and cons, what gets me is that there appears to be considerable overlap between Connections/Quickr and the work being done on QEDWiki.
On the one hand, it’s not surprising that in an organisation the size of IBM there’s some duplication of effort, but two such projects with what seem to be very similar feature sets looks careless. I’m guessing that QEDWiki may stay as the free, community-based offering, while the Lotus-branded products will be sold (they’re hoping) into corporates as Enterprise2.0 – although as ITNews points out, Microsoft owns the space at the moment, and is releasing new functionality around Sharepoint.

Following up the previous thread on IBM/Rational and SaaS, Infoworld has an interview with Rational’s Danny Sabbah in which he hints at, but carefully downplays, the possibility of Rational products being offered as hosted services.

Also following up on the requirements management stuff, my last post elicited a comment from Stewart Rogers of Rymatech pointing me to their Featureplan product, available on-premise or hosted. I had a look at the site, but to get more details on the hosted version and pricing, it seems I had to email their sales department. Stewart, can I suggest you check out Guy Kawasaki‘s recent blog post on hindering market adoption – they don’t all fit, but you might recognise some of them. I’m more into VRM than CRM

Oh – in case you’re wondering why I seem to kick IBM a bit: it’s because I like a lot of what they are doing, but they seem frustratingly unable to get it all together coherently, and I’d like to see them do better. It’s meant to be constructive – the corollary is that I don’t mention Microsoft much …

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