It was my second time at IBM's big annual customer event in Orlando and something just wasn't the same, Lotusphere felt slightly subdued this year.

There were many positives. Attendees at Lotusphere were up by two and a half per cent, according to IBM, which is a significantly good sign for the company since most technology conferences are down in numbers.

A fitting introduction to the oft referred to Big Blue company was given by the Blue Man Group (I was later told that this was meant to have some link to the Sametime update that was announced but this connection was lost on me). The key notes I attended were delivered well, with the presentation by the new Lotus Software general manager, Bob Picciano, who replaced Michael Rhodin, particularly upbeat with interesting customer stories from HSBC and Coca-Cola. Later Picciano kept his momentum going, making an effort to attend the press drinks and mingle for a while.

But whether it was the current economic climate and the threat of IT job losses, or the freezing Florida weather, something just wasn't quite right.

Last year there was more of a buzz. Although there was talk of recession, IT was still going strong. Actually the thought then was that IT was going to grow because businesses were going to invest in automation in order to cut back processing costs. But as I flew to out to Florida, jobs were being cut left, right and centre, with the nationals calculating 50,000 job losses since the beginning of January. Of course, a lot of these redundancies were occurring in the tech sector, and since December, I had covered layoff stories from Motorola, Autodesk, Oracle, Seagate, Microsoft, Google, EMC, Real, Viacom, Nokia and AT&T. That was only half the story with the range of firms trimming their headcounts indicating no sector is safe from the budget clips.

This news could have been worrying for IBMers, who might have thought they were next on the horizon, however, if this economic factor was the reason for the event's solemn mood then it would have surely cleared on the second day when positive financial results were released.

Maybe the mood was due to the weather. Last year it was sunny but this year, Florida was issuing freeze warnings. I felt guilty putting the heating on in my hotel room but I only packed a couple of light cardigans. Yet whether the cold could have affected other attendees as much as it did me is difficult to determine. I am British after all and we tend to be particularly weather sensitive.

On that point, I was also the only UK journalist attending Lotusphere and that could have impacted my own judgement. I was constantly in meetings with numerous French and Germans who seemed to know each other's publications and I was left slightly confused why IBM had as many representatives from the UK as Ukraine. As one of the Ukrainian attendees mentioned to me, the take-up of social networking in Eastern Europe is relatively small compared to Western Europe and the US. "You all like chit-chatting all the time but we like drinking and fighting," he joked. So why would IBM not take out more press from a market its Lotus social collaboration software fares well in?

But maybe the subdued feeling was down to none of these external factors and was simply due to the event organising and announcements.

I was surprised to find out that while hundreds and thousands were attending Obama's inauguration in Washinton DC, IBM's event organisers had not even factored in the historic moment in the agenda. I did make some time and missed my meeting around midday, although as soon as Obama started his great speech, a man fixing the bar plumbing system in the Orlando hotel turned off the TV.

Finally, while there were a number of announcements at Lotusphere, there was not anything groundbreaking. Most of the key news was of projects announced last year that were now ready to launch as products: project Bluehouse became LotusLive and project Atlantic became Alloy.

Maybe IBM should have made its partnerships with mobile companies the main focus of the event, rather than announcing them on the third day. Customers will now be able to access software from iPhones, Blackberry, Nokia and Samsung because of IBM's support of the Microsoft ActiveSync protocol and new partnerships with Research In Motion, Orange and Samsung.

27 Jan 2009