The New York Times reports today that IBM will unveil Lotus Connections, a social networking product, at Monday's annual Lotus Notes developers conference in Orlando.

Lotus Connections has five components — activities, communities, dogear (a bookmarking system), profiles and blogs — aimed at helping experts within a company connect and build new relationships based on their individual needs.

The profiles component, for example, lets users search for people by name, expertise or keyword. The program then not only provides contact information and reporting structure details, but also lists blogs, communities, activities and bookmarks associated with the person.

Inside I.B.M., employees have been using a prototype of the profiles feature for the last few years, and today 450,000 profiles of I.B.M. employees are stored there.

The innovative but closed and proprietary Lotus Notes enjoyed a few years of blue ocean until the rise of the internet stunted its ambitions in the 90s. Now IBM/Lotus borrows social networking from the internet to evolve its own product lines for the corporate customer. The article points to this move as a response to attacks from Microsoft's Exchange Server. The article doesn't mention Microsoft's Sharepoint Services and the similar offerings it includes in the latest 3.0 release:

The latest version of Windows SharePoint Services now includes new blogs and wikis for community collaboration, enhanced document management features to help ensure data integrity, and improved integration with client applications such as the Microsoft Office system.

IBM's offering seems to be bit more people or profile-centric. My friends at the behemoth regularly use Lotus Sametime to filter and communicate with others.

What's particularly interesting and also not mentioned in the article is how Connections might fit in with the workforce optimization consulting done by Brenda Dietrich's group at IBM. Internally, it has saved IBM at an estimated $700 million per year by efficiently allocating and forecasting the labor pool to projects. This type of algorithm intensive consulting service can surely be made into a product for a larger market and Lotus Connections would make a source of useful inputs for that effort. The talent allocation algorithms do need the inputs for each employee of skills, talents and projects worked. Watson lab algorithms that mine and analysize social connections from im's, emails, etc now have social activity to chew on.