IBM, as always, put on a really big show at Lotusphere this year. More than 5,000 attendees from all walks of IT and business came together to find out how IBM could help them execute their business strategies — and IBM promised to help them make their business social, and thus more personal and effective. Every IBM executive that I heard present or spoke with had one thing in mind: how to help customers evolve the culture of business from one where employees hoard information and rely on their own ability to solve problems to get themselves and their firm ahead to one where sharing information and insight enables better decision-making and better customer service.

Over two and a half days, I talked to (or heard presentations from) dozens of companies leveraging social technologies to accelerate their business, including:

• A global management consulting firm that is using an internal social platform to enable project teams to find and engage process and industry experts for client work — rather than having staffing managers rely on their personal networks — and which plans to extend that platform to support document creation and client delivery processes.
• A snack food company that created a public social platform to engage competitors in a process to eliminate a threat to raw material supply across their industry — rather than working on their own to solve the problem for their supply chain only.
• A retail bank that uses an internal social platform to optimize routing of customer inquiries to banking products experts located at other branches or central sites — rather than relying on branch personnel who may not know the answer or promising to respond to the customer later.

Avaya execs kicked off their sales and partner conference predictably — reviewing Avaya’s eight quarters of revenue growth, a shift of nearly a third of Avaya revenue to the channel in the last two years, and significant new product developments and introductions. The company’s focus on total solution results accruing to users (via Flare), to IT infrastructure owners (via Avaya Aura SIP-based architectures), and to Business Process owners (via Avaya ACE integration to business processes) allows partners and sales teams to have discussions with various buyers and influencers in the unified communications and collaboration (UC&C) market. This fits well with Avaya’s theme of “The Power of We” — not only do the solutions help customers work better collaboratively, but the partner programs aim to bring Avaya and its channels together to fulfill these needs. Kevin Kennedy stressed that the accelerating improvements in corporate results (revenue, margin, net promoter, and patents) are the result of many initiatives across the company —from product development to partner programs and beyond. One of his slides highlighted Avaya’s intention to deliver Faster collaborations that lead to Smarter decisions and Better business — Avaya is offering Faster, Better, Smarter to both channels and UC&C buyers.

Since this was a sales and channel conference, I took special note of the partners who sponsored and presented to the larger audience. I saw a clear representation of the broad opportunities and capabilities that demonstrate Avaya’s commitment delivering through channels to market — in short, the partners demonstrated that they value Avaya’s capabilities and transparency in going to market.

Mobile video solutions are riding a wave of demand from technology-centric information workers to help keep them connected in today’s geographically distributed, frenetically paced workplace. Many workers are bringing their own devices (and video communications applications) to work today. Resourceful information workers use video communications solutions that they have used in their consumer life to help them succeed at work. I have spoken to a bank that uses Skype on Internet-connected TVs to hold internal video meetings to reach executive consensus in the decision-making process, and to system integrators that use FaceTime to contact on-site teams to improve response time and communications clarity when resolving issues. Several Forrester clients have shared that they are uncomfortable using consumer video solutions for business purposes — citing the need for compliance and security. Video conferencing vendors have taken note and are working to ease adoption of their business-grade solutions — two recent examples leverage the popularity of tablets with technology-centric information workers.

Polycom and Vidyo have announced tablet-ready versions of their personal video portfolios recently — and their applications are available in the Android Market and Apple AppStore today. Avaya* and Cisco** have also launched tablet-powered video communications solutions. Both offer the option of delivering video on their own end point devices to optimize all forms of unified communications on a tablet. These solutions bring business-grade video conferencing to increasingly popular tablet platforms like the Apple iPad or Samsung Galaxy — delivering slick, engaging video experiences as seen in this photo.

With the end of the quarter closing in, I wanted to take a step back and fill you all in on new research we have on the way. This quarter we looked at the evolution of Social Enterprise Apps, and their effect on the enterprise collaboration landscape. In today’s globally dispersed, fast-paced, highly mobile workplace, high performance teams need new tools — and social appears to fit the bill.

What exactly is a Social Enterprise App? At a high level, Social Enterprise Apps enable info workers to establish and view groups of people, information, and processes. With embedded peer rating and information feeds about employee skills, team member profiles, team objectives, and project progress, info workers gain a deeper understanding of team performance goals and results.

What features do they have, and how do they affect business processes?

• Personal profiling identifies team members with the right skills.
• Activity streams increase awareness of achievements and status.
• Rating/voting enables learning from the accumulated knowledge of the team.

I just returned from Las Vegas where my meetings with Cisco executives, including John Chambers, Gary Moore, David Hsieh, Murali Sitaram, Kara Wilson, and OJ Winge, clearly demonstrated that Cisco is still moving forward. John Chambers and his team were in lockstep talking about two things: corporate strategic imperatives and organizational foundations for success

I believe that Cisco is sounding very much like a mature market leader as it balances risks and rewards in the rapidly changing markets for networking and collaboration. Precise financial measures got little talk time, but there were plenty of mentions that forward-looking statements do not supersede financial guidance given at regular updates — the team was focused on Cisco's plans to fuel future innovation, maintain its market position, and continue working on strategic relationship development with its most important customers.

John and the entire Cisco management team are focused on five corporate strategic imperatives:

1. Core routing/switching innovation and optimization.
2. Collaboration solutions.
3. Virtualization (including data center and cloud) technologies.
4. Video as a primary communication medium and IT task.
5. Architecture — defining and delivering IT architecture for businesses and service providers.