February 2009
This year PP sent a team of 7 to attend Lotusphere, IBM's flagship event for Lotus brand customers and business partners.  Our busy program during the week included:

•    Helping our customers to get the best from the event (we had two delegates dedicated to one of our largest customers)
•    Benefiting from the huge amounts of technical expertise available
•    Renewing relationships with existing business partners, and building relationships with new partners to ensure our      customers are benefitting from all the latest in complimentary additions to our services and technology

Our Lotus tagline - "You've got Talent" was so closely mirrored by IBM's own messages. The theme for 2009 was "Resonance. Collaboration and communication intensified", with nearly all the main sessions focusing on how Lotus technology enables organisations to maximise the talents of their people by empowering them to work together more effectively.

Whilst there were no major product announcements this year, there was a good deal of interest around Lotus Live, IBM's "cloud" offering for hosted software provided via a Software as a Service (SaaS) model, and our developers were very excited about XPages, which "will drastically reduce the amount of effort required to create visually appealing and powerful Web 2.0 applications" according to one of our senior consultants.

Our technical team made the most of the opportunity to get deep into the technology, attending nearly 100 sessions between them.  They also spent time meeting IBM's s/w product developers and various technical teams, an important focus area for PP since it enables us to "stay ahead of the game" when offering services to our customers. All this effort was well rewarded by the end of the week, with our team gaining seven new technical certifications ensuring we continue to be the best amongst in our customers and prospects alike.
We are looking forward to the UK Lotusphere events and will have more news on them as soon as they are available.
To see more on announcements from Lotusphere and highlights of the event, please click here.