Continental Selects IBM Lotus Software for Unified Messaging and Collaboration

Continental AG, an automotive manufacturer, recently acquired Siemens (News - Alert) VDO. The new combined organization selected IBM Lotus Notes and Domino software as their common messaging platform.

IBM (News - Alert) Lotus Domino is a low cost of ownership, security-rich platform for collaboration and business applications. IBM Lotus Notes is a business email solution that helps people effectively discover, transform, and share knowledge.

Also, Continental decided to deploy IBM Lotus Quickr and Sametime software as their collaboration and unified communications platform. IBM had lower licensing and operating costs and greater platform independence, compared to Microsoft (News - Alert).

In addition to Continental's 37,000 IBM Lotus Domino and Notes software users, the company now had 40,000 new Microsoft Exchange and Outlook users from the company it acquired. The evaluation considered several migration scenarios like immediately or gradually switching the entire group to the Lotus platform or migrating to third party open source products or hosted services.

In a release, Dr. Bernhard Thomas, head of IT Infrastructure Strategy at Continental AG, said: "Our strategy is focused on minimizing software interdependencies and, likewise, taking control over license related costs."

"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. That's why we chose it," said Dr. Thomas.

Continental now plans  Lotus Quickr to become the company's new default platform for team and project collaboration as Lotus Quickr provided a simpler, more direct integration with Lotus Notes, access to directories and calendars, integration with Lotus Sametime, which Continental uses for conferencing and instant messaging, and also lower infrastructure and licensing costs.

Continental also plans to use Lotus Quickr and Lotus Sametime to further expand on-line and real time collaboration within the company, as well as to employ new Enterprise 2.0 functions like tagging and alerting.

Paul Schwefer, Chief Information Officer at Continental, stated, "IBM Lotus software fits in well within Continental's strategy of permanently optimizing the flexibility, productivity and cost of our IT."