Continental chooses IBM Lotus software for unified messaging and collaboration

The company, which acquired powertrain giant Siemens VDO 18 months ago, rapidly selected IBM Lotus Notes and Domino software as its common messaging platform – and, over a four-month period, moved 40,000 Microsoft Outlook and Exchange users to the IBM platform. At the time, Continental also decided to deploy IBM Lotus Quickr and Sametime software as its overall collaboration and unified communications platform – with Continental's head of IT infrastructure strategy Dr Bernhard Thomas stating that the result would be lower licensing and operating costs, as well as greater platform independence. "Our strategy is focused on minimising software interdependencies and, likewise, taking control over license related costs," says Thomas. "We didn't see major differences between Lotus Notes and Microsoft Outlook with regard to client functionality, but the IBM software was more open and flexible and it also had lower infrastructure costs." Now, Lotus Quickr is to become the company's default platform for all uses in team and project collaboration. Thomas says Lotus Quickr provides simple, direct integration with Lotus Notes, access to directories and calendars and integration with Lotus Sametime, which Continental uses for conferencing and instant messaging. He also says that using Lotus Quickr will lead to lower infrastructure and licensing costs, and explains that Continental intends to use Lotus Quickr and Lotus Sametime to further expand on-line and real time collaboration within the company.