John D. Head aka "Starfish"

I can not tell you how excited I am about this announcement! Here is a tidbit from Ed's blog:

Today, IBM and SAP announced a joint product development, codenamed "Atlantic".  From the press release:
Currently planned for inclusion in the first release of project "Atlantic" is support for SAP workflows, reporting and analytics, and the use of roles from within the Lotus Notes client. In addition, tools are planned to be included to provide the ability to extend and adapt these roles and capabilities, as well as leverage additional collaborative and offline capabilities inherent in Lotus Notes and Domino products. The initial release is planned to ship in the fourth quarter of 2008 and will be sold by both companies.

"SAP and IBM Lotus are strategic partners to The Coca-Cola Company," said Jean Michel-Ares, CIO, Coca-Cola Company. "Our IT goal is to help our people to be more responsive, productive and effective, and SAP and IBM Lotus have helped us get closer to that goal.  The partnership between IBM Lotus, SAP and The Coca-Cola Company promises to deliver additional value to our associates and improve the tools they use every day."
There is a breakout session covering "Atlantic" on Tuesday at 11:15 AM, session AD306.

One of the coolest things about "Atlantic" is that it is customizable.  Prior efforts in this space, from us or others, have been relatively static in terms of capabilities.  In the meetings leading up to this announcement, I heard over and over how critical it is to have this modification capability.

"Atlantic" will ship in Q4 2008, and pricing and packaging are to be announced.

As a partner in the small and medium business space, we have seen some interesting tactics with Microsoft and SAP. When SAP gets a company to decide to move to their product, Microsoft uses this as an Exchange migration tactic.

"If you run SAP, you have to switch to Exchange and our server products. With Duet, we are the official partner of SAP"

That is no longer valid! SAP being on stage, working hand in hand with IBM and Lotus, and bringing continued support to Lotus Notes access to SAP solutions.

Honestly, whatever happens from a technical perspective is not as important as the ringing endorsement SAP just gave Notes and Lotus. I think this could be a major game changer when it comes to the mid-market and growing the Lotus business. C level executives are really going to notice this. Wow.