IBM Project Vulcan Manages Social Info Overload

ORLANDO, Fla.—IBM Jan. 18 said it is working on a new effort to add social analytics to its Lotus collaboration software portfolio to help businesses filter out some of the noise in their social networks.

Dubbed Project Vulcan, the initiative will appear in a developer environment beta in the second half of 2010 from LotusLive Labs, a new research effort that IBM plans to open to partners to propel its cloud computing efforts for collaboration.

Vulcan was unveiled at Lotusphere 2010 by new IBM Lotus General Manager Alistair Rennie, who provided very few specific details about the effort. Social analytics created under the aegis of this environment will be used to offer workers recommendations for expertise, relevant content and business events.

Given this context, Vulcan may be taking a page out of popular consumer social networks such as Facebook or MySpace, which offer users personalized recommendations based on their behavior within the network and their interactions with friends and contacts.

Vulcan also recalls emerging technologies in enterprise social networking from companies such as Radian6, Mzinga, Attensity, Socialcast and Jive Software, which just acquired Filtrbox to help knowledge workers drill down into relevant themes and communication for insight that cuts through the clutter in the social cloud.

"Vulcan is designed to deliver an incredibly elegant user experience by bringing together all sorts of different services," Rennie told eWEEK during a question and answer session after the announcement here. Vulcan will also boast a strong mobile component, leveraging business users' location information.

Vulcan will stitch loosely coupled services together, leveraging IBM xPages, HTML5 and RESTful APIs, and allow users to take action on events in multiple Lotus applications with a single click.

Technologies that evolve from Project Vulcan will seep into IBM's Lotus portfolio, including LotusLive, Lotus Notes and Domino, Lotus Connections, Quickr, and WebSphere Portal.

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