With Lotus Symphony, IBM beefs up its collaboration software portfolio…
“The week is not off to a great start for Microsoft. On Monday, a European court upheld almost $1 billion in antitrust penalties against the software maker.”
A day later, Big Blue took a swipe at Microsoft Office by announcing it will make available a suite of free productivity software suite called “Lotus Symphony” that contains a word processor, spreadsheet program and a presentation application.
The company, based in Armonk, N.Y., announced Sept. 18 the tool set, known as Lotus Symphony, at the IBM Collaboration Summit at the Hayden Planetarium in New York City.
IBM officials said there are three core applications that make up the Lotus Symphony tools: Lotus Symphony Documents; Lotus Symphony Spreadsheets; and Lotus Symphony Presentations. The tools support Windows and Linux desktops and are designed to handle the majority of office productivity tasks that workers typically perform.
“Lotus Symphony supports multiple file formats including Microsoft Office and ODF (Open Document Format), and can also output content in PDF format.”
IBM said that Symphony, based on open source software from the OpenOffice.org project, will be made available as a free download essentially to whoever wants it.
Users can download the Symphony tools at: http://www.ibm.com/software/lotus/symphony.
According to the New York Times, IBM’s move is a direct challenge to the dominance enjoyed by Microsoft Corporation through its long-standing proprietary Office software, which delivers word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation applications bundled into a single package.
While existing Lotus-branded proprietary applications produced by IBM already rival Microsoft’s own software in terms of e-mail, messaging, and work group collaboration, the new Symphony suite will be delivered to compete against Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.
IBM is calling the suite “enterprise-grade productivity software” and points out that it is based on many of the same tools found in its pricey “Lotus Notes 8” e-mail and collaboration platform.
Symphony builds upon IBM’s recent decision earlier this month, to contribute portions of the Lotus Notes software code to the OpenOffice.org community, which governs the Open Office project, while promoting the Open Document Format (ODF).
As an Open Office derivative, Lotus Symphony employs the Open Document Format to ensure cross-application portability of data. ODF is an approved ISO format, a fact that appeals to many enterprise software buyers — particularly those in the government market.
Since Symphony is based on ODF, organizations can rest assured that they will be able to use and modify all of their documents for the long-term, according to Mills, the senior VP of IBM’s Software Group. “With the Open Document Format, businesses will be able to unlock their information, making it universally accessible on any platform and on the Web in highly flexible ways,” Mills said.
While Lotus Symphony builds on the capabilities of the publicly available OpenOffice suite, it is much more than a simple repackaging of OpenOffice, according to IBM Lotus strategy team member Greg Lepofsky. In addition, Lotus Symphony provides multiple language support and accessibility features that large enterprises would expect from IBM, Lepofsky explained.
“IBM is committed to opening office desktop productivity applications just as we helped open enterprise computing with Linux,” Mills, said in a statement.
“The lifeblood of any organization is contained in thousands of documents. When those documents are based on proprietary software, only future versions of the same software will be able to access that intelligence. This dynamic forces companies to keep paying license and maintenance fees to the same vendor for a basic commodity. Now businesses can unlock their critical office information free of the costs and controls of any vendor.”
Other advanced features of Symphony include the ability to gather information relevant to a particular task from several discrete sources, and then present the worker with a consistent view of the information.
“For example, the results of queries to an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system can be channeled directly onto any worker’s PC desktop to populate the fields in a customer’s shipping invoice.”
“It is all about making information universally accessible and putting it to work on any platform and on the Web in highly flexible ways,” Mills noted.
Analysts said the moves made sense for IBM and its customers.
“I think IBM Lotus Symphony is likely to become a useful boost for the OpenOffice.org-based family of products, and it is sensible for IBM to offer the suite outside of the Notes 8 client, to help its version of the OpenOffice.org applications build momentum,” said Peter O’Kelly, an analyst with The Burton Group.
O’Kelly added that he doubts Symphony will put any real dent in Microsoft Office’s market share, but he said it may help to consolidate the many OpenOffice.org-based offerings available today.
However, analysts claim that IBM’s positioning and reputation, especially with business customers, could provide a significant boost to open-source packages developed for desktop users.
Moreover, IBM’s history with open source technology has already seen it pushing its engineers, marketing prowess, and development dollars at Linux, which has gone on to become a mainstream technology embraced by businesses as a viable alternative to Microsoft’s Windows Sever package.
Symphony is currently designed to work with computers running either Windows or Linux, and support for Apple’s Mac OS is reportedly in the works. Lepofsky said he anticipates a Mac version of Symphony could become available as early as the first quarter of 2008.
Current users of IBM’s Lotus Notes collaboration software will receive Symphony with their updates free of charge. Others can download Lotus Symphony free of charge through IBM’s Web site.
“IBM also will package the software, known as “Lotus Symphony,” with its other offerings such as Domino and WebSphere.”