This was announced on Twitter today, but I wanted to provide some more information. Following nine months in the role of Messaging & Collaboration Business Unit Executive (North East Europe) I’m moving back to a role with Lotus UK & Ireland (UKI as it’s known). In the this new role I’ll be looking after the growth markets of Unified Communication & Collaboration and software-as-a-service. In other words, Sametime in all it’s flavours, Sametime Unified Telephony, and LotusLive.

Perceptions are interesting. I received a great many ‘congratulations’ messages today – thank you for those. I also received a few messages along the lines of “what happened?”, “was I happy about it?” and “was I pushed?”. I know the reasons for these questions – essentially the North East Europe role could be seen as senior to the UKI role. I’m returning to a role very similar to my previous role, albeit with different aspects of the portfolio.

To answer those questions… yes I am happy and no I wasn’t pushed. I instigated the move. I was asked to re-consider, and I received a great many internal e-mails citing disappointment (and best wishes) and an acknowledgement that I’d done a great job.

So why did I make the move back? I’m not going to discuss it fully here, but one of the main reasons was travel – multiple days away and arriving back late at night was not suiting me or the family. I know some people relish it and find the travel exciting, but I didn’t realise the impact it would have.

My new title will be something like ‘Portfolio Manager, Unified Communications and On-Line Collaboration Services’ – let’s see if that will squeeze onto a business card.

This hit the Twittersphere yesterday and was also blogged about by Stuart McIntyre on his LotusLive blog… the combined services of LotusLive have now attracted 18 million paying subscribers. Since we started the year with zero paying subscribers that’s pretty good growth. The story is then picked up by ZDNet who theorise that the annual revenue from those subscribers could be $648 million, thus justifying IBM’s acquisitions and development efforts… and indeed the overall decision to throw their hat into the market.

ZDNet also mention the fact that IBM LotusLive offers an extensive range of services, and I go would as far it say it’s one of the most extensive ranges in the whole software-as-a-service / cloud-based market – a choice of e-mail, integrated collaborative services and web meetings.

In September, the Lotus team in Sweden will be holding their Gold Club event – a meeting (with dinner thrown in) for their most valued customers. Our Swedish country manager Kristoffer invited me (in my new capacity) to come over and talk to the assembled audience about how Lotus solutions were helping customers to reduce costs and improve efficiency. “No problem” I said – Sweden is a nice place to visit and there’s nothing I like more than hearing my own voice talking about our wonderful portfolio of products. Well, actually there are a few things I like more, but let’s keep this work-related.

After a few minutes mulling this proposition, I had an idea… instead of just me talking about customer successes, why not actually get in a real breathing carbon-based life-form from our customer base to present to this group of Nordic captains of industry? It would have to be someone from an organisation who had a presence in Sweden and who was a willing advocate of Lotus solutions… I knew just the man. And so it was that I got in touch with Mark Calleran, CIO of The Salvation Army.

If you attended either the London or Manchester-based Lotusphere Comes To You events this year, you’ll have seen Mark present. His content was a mixture of what The Salvation Army do and then how they use Lotus technology – it actually gives me a good feeling when I hear about our solutions helping this wonderful organisation to provide relief around the world and generally do work to improve the life of millions of people. And comments afterwards are generally along the lines of “I never knew The Salvation Army did so many things”.

Fortunately Mark agreed, and now we come to the point of the blog post. Suddenly it wasn’t just Kristoffer and me collaborating on content and logistics, we had someone from outside of IBMland taking part in the process… someone without access to the IBM network and certainly no ability to login to our Connections infrastructure. This is where LotusLive Engage came to our rescue.

As IBMers, Kristoffer and I have LotusLive Engage accounts, and I was already connected to Mark. Kristoffer found Mark, connected with him and invited him to the newly-created activity. And since then it’s been as simple as that… we’ve used the activity to track the agenda, the synopses of our talks, biography information, and hotel and travel details. It was very easy to allow people from two (very different) organisations to collaborate.

Of course, I didn’t get away without a small task to take to Product Management – when can Mark have an activities plug-in for Notes 8.5 which allows a view of both his internal activities and those from LotusLive Engage? Hmmm… answer: in a forthcoming version, probably / maybe. In the meantime, I’m sure that we’ll be demonstrating our Pokens to an audience of esteemed Swedes.

Earlier this week, the LotusLive home page received a face-lift, making it easier for visitors to understand the services of the LotusLive family. The new compare services page breaks down the services into components so that you can see what you get with each of them.

Later today, you’ll be able to sign up for a 30-day trial of the newest offering, LotusLive Connections. This service was announced at the recent Enterprise 2.0 conference (the setting for Microsoft’s drubbing at the hands of Lotus Connections 2.0 last year). To quote the press release “as part of the unveiling, LotusLive was voted the winner of The Enterprise 2.0 Cloud Computing Technology Buyers’ Choice Award. IBM’s cloud services won in a side-by-side comparison with Google Apps, EMC and other vendors’ cloud technologies, as voted by the Enterprise 2.0 conference attendees”.

To summarise, the main difference between LotusLive Engage and Connections is the omission of web conferences, forms and charts. However, the good news is that the stream-lined set of core capabilities will be available at a lower cost than that of Engage. So many businesses are interested in the possibilities of enterprise-grade social collaboration – we have already provided this in the form of IBM Lotus Connections (available to deploy on-premise), but the LotusLive offering provides an easy way to get started with minimal investment and to start collaborating with your extended enterprise and external contacts.