The changes at Lotus had trickled out just a few days before the show opened. Bob Picciano, who has done so much in reinvigorating Lotus in his two years at the helm, has been promoted upwards within IBM. He's now Director of Worldwide Sales at IBM Software. Long time Loti, Alastair Rennie, has taken his place as Lotus General manager.

Mike Rhodin, Bob's predecessor at Lotus has also been promoted within IBM, which means that the last two previous Lotus GMs are now in positions of influence in the IBM hierarchy -- which can't be bad in ensuring that the Lotus brand stays in the forefront of IBM's thinking.

At the Opening session, once all that had been dealt with, and Bob had given the usual upbeat state-of-the-nation remarks on Lotus in 2009, we had four customers on the stage to tell their stories, rapidly followed by five business partners, all with good stories.

On the face of it, the OGS had gone a bit flat -- long on words, but a bit short in real content. But there's the thing; a little reflection showed that all nine said basically the same thin. They are invigorated with what Lotus are doing, are trusting Lotus products and intentions, and are looking forward to the future, content with their choice of Lotus software.

Live long and prosper
Then, just twenty minutes from the end, came something that made everybody sit up: the announcement of IBM's Project Vulcan.

Project Vulcan is intended to deliver the next generation of collaboration platform. It's going to build on the best of what Lotus have already, add new features and functionality, and provide a new and rather different collaborative platform.

That certainly got the audience's attention, along with a very compelling demo. The idea, and as yet it's more of a vision with some demos than it is fully working code, is to go well beyond what's been done with the Notes 8.5 client in the way that the user's experience is made up from services from the different Lotus products.

There's some strong themes being put forward for Vulcan. Firstly, continuity. Vulcan is intended to build on the existing product set, not to replace it. Every IBM executive I spoke with was very clear that this is in no way a return to the dark days of 2002 and the two-lane highway story.

Next theme was convergence -- bringing the product capabilities closer together, with rich but loose coupling, so that the end user has a seamless experience whether she is clicking on something in Notes, Quickr, Sametime, or Connections, and regardless of whether she's using a browser, a rich -- Notes -- client, or a smartphone, and also regardless of whether the specific service is in-house or in the cloud, specifically the LotusLive cloud, though not even that is a given.