Saudi Business Machines (SBM), the general marketing and services representative of IBM World Trade Corporation in Saudi Arabia organised a series of road shows in Saudi Arabia focusing on IBM’s Lotus software.

The ‘Lotusphere Comes To You’ road shows in Riyadh, Jeddah and Khobar showcased the latest collaborative software solutions from Lotus software, aimed at making business collaboration faster, easier and available anytime, anywhere.

The road shows focused on the entire range of Lotus products from IBM, which empower both businesses and their end users through the sharing of information in a team space and use latest Web 2.0 based tools such as blogs and wikis.

With over 145 million users worldwide, IBM Lotus Notes and Domino has achieved unprecedented growth over the last 16 consecutive quarters. The software solutions meet the changing needs of all businesses – Lotus Foundation attracts small and medium businesses, Lotus Symphony offers customers a great free alternate to expensive office suite.

Industry’s first Social Software for Business helps customers to attract and retain new talent pool and also to capture intellectual property as a complete knowledge base utilizing community centric collaboration.

“In challenging economic times, the ability to collaborate with colleagues, partners and customers from around the world is a financial necessity,” said Nazeer Aval, Lotus Software brand leader, at SBM.

“With the latest versions of Lotus collaborative product portfolio, SBM/IBM is helping businesses save money and time by lowering TCO and identify ROI benefits quickly and easily,” he added.

Lotus solutions such as Sametime offers unified communication and collaboration (UC2) to customers with real time presence awareness, location awareness, easy multiple IP PBX integration, ‘click to call’ from any native applications, online meetings, instant share, web conferencing etc.

The key benefit to customers here is to continue using existing communication systems while extending the real time collaboration to end users seamlessly.

“Today's businesses require a flexible and high-performance integrated work environment in order to respond effectively to the changing demands, within the context of the work he or she is doing,” said Nazeer, adding that the road shows helped highlight all these salient features to the end-users.

The road shows also shed light on IBM's WebSphere portal solution which entails the complete portal services that are necessary to deliver a single point of personalized interaction to applications, content, business processes and people for a unified user experience.

According to Gartner Analysts, WebSphere portal is the market leading vendor for the last eight years in a row.

At the road shows, SBM/IBM also announced a free consultancy engagement, called “Project Liberate”, to help customers analyse existing IT maintenance cost and guide them to save money.

Customers benefited by learning to buy what they need versus buying into a bundling of products that they may not fully utilise.  In the process, many customers have "liberated" budget dollars to fund other projects or initiatives. – TradeArabia News Service