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IBM Helps Businesses, Consumers Weather the Storm With Cost Effective Software>
By Stephen Langton on 28 January 2009
To help customers get the most out of their information technology (IT) in challenging business conditions, IBM is offering a growing portfolio of low or no-cost software.
Designed to help small-to-medium sized businesses (SMBs) reduce the time and money associated with deploying and managing IT solutions, IBM Lotus Foundations Start 1.1 and a new offering, Lotus Foundations Branch Office, were unveiled today at Lotusphere. Lotus Foundations is IBM's hardware and software solution that helps businesses from 5 - 500 employees collaborate with tools like email, office applications, file sharing, back up and recovery.
The latest version of Lotus Foundations Start, allows customers to take advantage of existing IT investments by providing the ability to run Microsoft Windows applications within a Lotus Foundations environment. Previously announced as a pilot program with VMware, this new capability will give customers the ability to run IBM Lotus Domino, Windows and native Linux applications.
Many large organizations running Lotus Domino such as banks, professional services firms and insurance agencies have significant portions of their businesses in branch offices without on-site IT. With Lotus Foundations Branch Office, large enterprise Lotus Domino customers will be able to extend existing skills and data to remote offices quickly and efficiently. Lotus Foundations Branch Office will help large organizations reduce costs and better manage operations by supporting the sometimes complex technology needs of the branch and satellite offices with a fully integrated appliance.
Business Partners are taking note of Lotus Foundations. Lotus+911, Research In Motion (RIM) and ShoreTel have evaluated Lotus Foundations' functionality and ease-of-use, and believe it is a good platform to reach the SMB market.
IBM is working with Xerox to align Lotus Foundations and Xerox's multi-function printing devices to empower Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) and Value Added Resellers(VARs) to better support small business customers.
"Xerox's Extensible Interface Platform (EIP) enables solutions to be built that manage documents and other digital content that flow to and from our multi-function printing (MFP) devices," said Tom Durkin, director for corporate strategy, Xerox. "With Lotus Foundations, IBM has a simple and secure platform that supports document solutions that involve encoded and image information and is ideal to simplify SMB business processes. Combine Foundations and EIP and you will have a complete collaboration infrastructure in which solutions can be prototyped, developed and deployed quickly and easily to the SMB market."
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