The Symphony Blog

Chris is an Executive Information Technology Architect for the IBM Office of the CIO.   In that role, Chris has responsibility for IBM's internal end user services strategy encompassing both hardware (e.g. laptops) and software (e.g. Lotus Software, Web 2.0, etc.).  An important job indeed!

In a recent post, Chris details how IBM is rolling out Lotus Symphony amongst its users:

Microsoft Office is the industry's leading productivity suite and has close to 85% marketshare.  The downside?  It's expensive - especially for a company as large as IBM that continues to grow.  At last count, IBM had 370,000 employees.   Money spent on Microsoft Office licenses increases IBM's overall expenses.     Launched last year, Lotus Symphony beta offers

"productivity tools that are intuitive and easy to use and provided at no charge. Lotus Symphony puts you in charge – take control over spiraling upgrade costs, ensure access to documents well into the future with new standard file formats (ODF), get more from your current investments with support for Microsoft® Windows® and Office file types.... even extend your applications with the new Lotus Symphony developer toolkit.  Lotus Symphony offers something for everyone! Read more about benefits for users, businesses, and developers"

Inside IBM, our employees are using Lotus Symphony and in some cases, removing Microsoft Office from their workstations.  Later this year, the product is targeted to graduate out of beta as also release a Mac OS X client.

From Twitter messages I know that Chris has more to say on this "challenge" to the internal users and so it will be interesting to hear how the migration progresses over the next months and years.

Already I know of a large number of IBMers who have either removed MS Office from their Windows machines or else migrated entirely to a Linux desktop running Lotus Symphony.  These have been successful "power user" migrations where MS Office has not been missed and significant licence fees saved, so there are clearly benefits to be had from taking this route.