Lots of people know about IBM’s commitment to Eclipse but the awareness is typically of IBM Rational developer tools. What I find intriguing is the rising prominence of Eclipse in the Lotus division.
It is pretty clear to me that IBM Lotus is executing on a platform strategy that spans Lotus Notes, Sametime and their new Symphony product line. At the heart of this strategy is Eclipse RCP.
The nice thing to see is that Lotus seems to really be benefiting from a common integration platform based on Eclipse. For instance,
- In this article, that compares Sametime and MS OCS the highlights for Sametime discuss the advantages of a platform strategy that is extensible and cross-platform.
Eclipse’s open software strategy allows IBM Lotus customers to easily extend or embed unified communications capabilities within their line-of-business applications, over a number of different operating systems. It also allows them to employ third-party, value-add products as part of the solution.
- At the recent Lotusphere, Lotus announced support for Ubuntu and RHEL. The quote from Canonical reflects something I believe is true for all Linux desktops; Eclipse allows Lotus and any ISVs to create a very powerful cross-platform rich-client applications.
From a technical viewpoint, we are impressed how Lotus leverages the Eclipse platform to build and deliver rich client applications. This is an exciting development for Ubuntu users, too.”
- Finally, Lotus Symphony, IBM’s alternative to MS Office based on OpenOffice and Eclipse RCP, is starting down a strategy to allow developers to create plugins for Symphony, all based on the Eclipse plug-in model.
Eclipse as a tools integration platform has been without a doubt very successful. It would now appear that Lotus is building another integration platform for desktop applications. It will be fascinating to watch the success.
The great thing for the Eclipse community is that Eclipse RCP is now installed on millions of desktops. What a great opportunity for Eclipse plug-in developers.
