Lotus Project Vulcan Aims to Reduce Information Overload

Maybe one of the coolest and most intriguing news stories to come out of Lotusphere last week was IBM’s mysterious-sounding “Project Vulcan.” Introduced  with a demo, a short press release and a quirky surprise appearance by Star Trek veteran and Priceline pitchman William Shatner, Project Vulcan looks a lot like Facebook with a competitive dash of Google Wave.

IBM described Project Vulcan as “a blueprint for the future of collaboration.” Still in its infancy, the “blueprint” is a software seedling developer environment that will be posted on LotusLive Labs in the second half of the year. However, the overarching message is that Project Vulcan aims to reduce “the growing problem of personal information overload.”

VARs and software developers wanting to take advantage of IBM’s growing on-demand Lotus business, LotusLive, can use the loosely coupled development framework to build collaborative business applications. Project Vulcan allows developers to marry enterprise collaboration information like contacts, email and files with Big Blue’s mature analytics to help businesses be more agile and making locating expertise, relevant content and identifying critical business events and issues more efficient and easier. Project Vulcan is designed to play on the most popular and emerging technology trends out there today, including cloud, mobile devices and social networking.

IBM says Project Vulcan capabilities will be released in future versions of LotusLive, Notes, Domino, Connections, Quickr and WebSphere Portal. Developers will be able to use the capabilities to create new collaborative applications.

“One of its key themes is social analytics and business analytics combined and applied to industry-specific scenarios — making collaboration more focused and relevant,” said Ed Brill, Lotus director of product management.