I read this news release with great excitement and will take a shameless opportunity to plug what I think is a fantastic partnership. The news? IBM’s Lotus group has announced support of its Open Collaboration Client Solution (OCCS) for Ubuntu Linux. OCCS is a layer of rich client communications apps including IBM Lotus Notes 8.5 (Calendaring, Email), Sametime 7.x (Instant Messaging), and Symphony (OpenOffice in an Eclipse RCP form). I’ve switched to Ubuntu for my primary system at home for well over a year now and while I took a very short break to dabble in Fedora 8, I’m back on Ubuntu again. I’ve been using a RHEL5 base at work for over a year as well but now that we have Ubuntu support coming, I’ll probably switch to Ubuntu once the OCCS solution is released (yes, I work in a strategy group in IBM and I don’t use Windows or MS Office - and most people can’t tell). The thing about working in IBM is that everyone uses Notes, Sametime, and ODF is even becoming more popular so there’s very little that prevents anyone from using Linux (or a Mac). Heck, many users can probably get away with an iPhone.

IBM also expanded the OCCS platform support with Red Hat EL Desktop and announced more partners around OCCS on Novell’s Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED).

What makes all this even better? Enterprise applications delivered in a rich client environment. Take for instance SAP, who today announced a joint product set with IBM that will be delivered through Lotus Notes (which we now know runs well on Linux)

The product, codenamed Atlantic, will allow users to access SAP’s Business Suite applications for workflows, reporting and analytics through IBM’s Lotus Notes desktop software.

So the ecosystem and vision is starting to come together. It’s early, but I would be remiss if I didn’t mention again that 2008 will be the year of the enterprise Linux client ;-) How many users will we be saying this for? :-) (Note, I didn’t say ‘desktop’ specifically, and I said ‘enterprise’). As we’ve been saying all along, there are certain segments of users that can easily do their work on a Linux client (many won’t even know it’s not Windows). Those companies who take advantage of user segmentation have a lot to benefit from both on pure cost alone, but also in the next round of negotiations on your non-Linux client systems ;-)