I know I had promised to refrain from pointless criticism and open bashing on my blog: “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say nothing at all”. But my experience with LotusLive has been so abysmal that I simply cannot keep quiet.
I still want to begin by saying something nice. I think LotusLive is a great offering. The idea behind it is superb. It offers the ability to share and collaborate that is better than other similar offerings from IBM’s competitors. I remember the applause when in January of 2009 Bob Picciano stood on stage at Lotusphere and announced LotusLive. Unfortunately, when IBM was building its Lotus branded Software as a Service, it spent so much time focusing on the software part, that it completely forgot to build the service component.
A client of PSC needed a place to collaborate and share with a new client of their own. They asked our advice on best way to do this quickly and cost efficiently. In 2 weeks they were going out to a kick off meeting with their client and they wanted to have the collaboration platform in place by then. We thought about it and decided to tell them about this new SaaS platform from IBM that did everything they needed to do and would cost them about $1, 000 USD per year. Our client bought into the idea. Little did I know what kind of a mess I got myself into.
Silly me! I never bought a LotusLive license before, but thinking the SaaS model, I thought that a couple of clicks through the LotusLive site and a credit card number would do the trick. Wrong! Out of all the purchases I’ve ever made in my life, buying a LotusLive subscription or a license is the most complicated one. I rank it somewhere between buying a house and getting a GreenCard.
It turns out that in order to buy a single license of LotusLive, there are forms to be filled out and faxed/emailed back to IBM. You don’t get these forms all at once. They come one at a time, from different channels. And these forms have to make their way through the IBM bureaucracy and approval process, which takes several weeks, before they reach the LotusLive sales team, which only then can grant you a full license. Since we couldn’t wait that long and had to be up and running pretty quick, the LotusLive team ended up giving us a full-access temporary license, which later, when all the paperwork is processed, got converted to a full license. All this took a lot of emails and phone calls on our part to push the process through — several weeks of effort all for a $1000-purchase. We made no money on this transaction. In fact, if I count the hours and the energy we spent on making this happen, we lost money on the transaction.
So, IBM, if you’re planning to continue to push LotusLive, you really need to re-evaluate your entire approach to this offering. SaaS should be simple. It’s all web based, it’s all browser based. I should be able to sign up for a free account using my browser. And, when ready to switch to a full paid account, I should be able to do this using the same browser and a credit card. The process should be SIMPLE. If it is not, I’m going to your competition. And some of your competition,while perhaps not offering all the same features, offers a lot of them for free. Frankly, if I was trying to set this up for myself, after a couple of days I would have just switched to Google Groups — not quite the same but free and I can be up and running in 5 minutes.
And lastly, if you want your Business Partners to help you sell LotusLive, figure out a way for them to make money on this offering. Otherwise, like a lot of other great things that have come out of IBM over the years, LotusLive will get killed by the competition. And in this case, you’re making it way too easy for them.
If this were Twitter, I would say “LotusLive as a service platform #fail”.
What is your experience with LotusLive?
Filed under: Collaboration, IBM Tagged: | IBM, Lotus, LotusLive, SaaS
I am considering LotusLive for a new company of ours. Maybe I should just buy a server and do it all myself. Thank you for saving me a lot of aggravation.
I run LotusLive and I take the task of listening to our customers and partners very seriously.
Alex, I am very sorry to hear you had such a poor experience enabling a single user on LotusLive. Today we enable online trials and we will be enabling Credit card ordering in later 2009 or early 2010. We are experiencing very heavy demand in the mid market and enterprise market segment but we clearly need to re-double our efforts in SMB or single user purchases.
I would gladly make time to hear from directly one on one as a prospective partner. This is the best and only way for us to improve our service to you. Please feel free to contact me directly as I would like to see how i can correct this situation. We have plans to expand our partner approach in 2010 and would welcome your input on that too
LotusLive as you said, is an exciting online service. We just won, Buyers Choice award at the Enterprise 2.0 event, beating out Google. We will continue to improve the business systems that support LotusLive to further strengthen our position
Looking forward to talk to you
Sean Poulley
VP LotusLive
Sean, I have tried to feed back my experiences via the lotus business partner forum, if you are after partner feedback that is the best place to go imho
I think that some partners will also have lost interest when their accounts were canceled
I think this could be an amazing offering but there are issues that people are trying to tell you about
Sean
[...] This post was Twitted by edbrill [...]
Alex, I’ve spoken with several Lotus partners who are adding Socialtext to the list of platforms that they recommend to their customers when the fit is right. I’d be happy to talk to you and PSC about it, or take a look at http://www.socialtext.com/.
Alan, I’m well aware of SocialText, of course. This was an attempt to promote the new Lotus offering. It didn’t work. We got the customer up on Quickr at this point.
@ Sean – I have to ask why is it taking so long to implement credit card ordering? Surely if this was to be aimed at any SMB (by our definition of SMB) this should of been in place from the start?
So I am glad the customer used Quickr. Its a great product.
Sean the reason we didn’t implement SMB from the very start is that we are seeing very very strong demand in enterprise and midmarket. We will address credit card ordering. Just a matter of prioritizatiion
Ahok… so at the moment this product is not aimed at the SMB market. Ok, that was a bit snarky, but what I mean is that a shining marketing point of this product is that it can be used by any size business – from the typical IBM capture point (i.e. Monsterous) to a 10 man company, of which there are millions.
Setting up CC ordering and total transparent, quick and simple enrollement into this application should be a priority.
But then again, what do I know.
Paul, I agree. I expected this to be a simple process. You want a reliable and supported hosted collaboration platform backed by a name like IBM? Give us a credit card and off you go. Up and running in 5 minutes.
Interestingly enough, SameTime Unyte takes a credit card.
LotusLive has a long way to go. The SMB market is the key to the success of any SaaS. The whole process creates a big barrier of entry which in turns creates a bad image of the product. I was going to use it as part of the MWLUG Green Project, but the process was too time consuming so we did not use it. For Business Partners, LotusLive should be part of the Value Package and there needs to be a mechanism for Business Partners to make money as Alex said or they will not promote it.
[...] loved it when Sean Poulley, VP in charge of LotusLive, commented on my blog in response to a post on LotusLive and got engaged in a conversation. I didn’t love it because I got the attention. I loved it [...]