At the Speed of Light

The speed at which we communicate today is truly facinating. When the phone was invented over a 100 years ago nobody could of thought about mobile phones, satellite phones or smart phones. The invention of email about 20 years ago gave a whole new dimension. Email travels at the speed of light but at the pace we´re going today email has already made place for instant messaging and real time communication for many people and businesses. Although there are no real figures available it is for sure that the amount of ´real time communication´that is going on every day around the globe greatly surpasses the amount of e-mails sent. Why? Because its...faster and cheaper again. And of course because it opens up much more opportunity like web conferencing, sharing files and photo´s, and playing games all in real time and regardless of our location.

During a recent Lotusphere Comes to You Road show Lotus guru Ron Sebastian demonstrated the new Lotus Sametime 7.5 environment. This fully open, eclipse based, platform is a new leap forward towards real time business including sound proof ´click to call´capabilities (with Skype quality), ´instant communities´ and location awareness locating people all over the globe via (for example) Google maps.

Sametime truly allows people in different places to work together in a virtual office, whether they’re across the hall or across the globe. Sametime 7.5 will have secure and completely free connections to other, public networks like Google talk, Yahoo and AOL. And as soon as Microsoft decides to start using its (own developed) SIP protocol maybe also MSN messenger. Lotus also announced partnerships with Nokia and Rim enabling their new Communicators and Blackberry´s standard with the new Sametime mobile client.

IBM started saving ± 40 million $ a year after the introduction of Sametime some years ago. It´s already more important then email and it´s importance will only increase with the coming of these new possibilities. Why send a mail if you can speak to someone live whilst sharing a file and instantly sending a quick feedback poll to the rest of the community? All over a (virtually) free Internet connection... its much more efficient and saves money and time.