Sunil Cherian, the VP of Product Marketing at Array Networks and I had a great meeting at the end of a long day at Interop. The SSL VPN challenger has introduced a green product line. 

 Array's new AppVelocity (APV) appliance utilizes a low power 1U server. It uses 60% less power than other appliances, and the performance features assure that network bandwidth is 30% lower. In addition to these benefits, the process of off-loading caching, connections, and SSL processing, APV significantly reduces server overhead by 40% or more.

In addition to the APV, Sunil also provided his perspectives on two other new products:

When Tellme was first acquired by Microsoft, I assigned the lowest Deal Score rating ever, to the deal. I thought it was a lot of money for speech recognition service.

Earlier this week (April 23, 2008), the subsidiary made news: a free, BlackBerry-based, speech-driven, GPS-enabled location-based search service. So think about all the keywords involved in this product - free, mobile, search, speech, GPS, location, advertising. Blows the mind, eh?

Users download a client which coordinates the GPS detail and the spoken search term, delivering both to the Tellme network which does the interpretation, delivering the search parameters to Microsoft Live search servers which deliver the results to the users' screen. With click to call options, your pizza order is only moments away from being taken by the closest pizzeria. These local search terms are not well addressed by the search engines. Would you do a search engine lookup for pizza? 

I tried but got only the national chains listings. I suppose I'd have to do their outlet lookup service to find the closest one. 

The thing that got my attention however, more than the functionality of the service, was that it was NOT on a Microsoft platform! Amazing. Microsoft delivers functionality on other platforms first. That's the news here. Good for Tellme. Maybe, we'll see some other announcements like this soon from Microsoft...

Lotus Connections is IBM's social networking application for enterprise. With five components - Profiles, Activities, Blog, Communities and Dogears - the first release has only been around for seven months so far. A couple hundred companies have deployed the product, with roughly 50% being deployed in EMEA.

Profiles

Profiles is a browser-accessible database of employee expertise and backgrounds. It is really about giving employees control over the corporate directory content, allowing simple things to be easily updated and search-able. This is an important step in enabling expertise searching, something that is a particularly important problem in large, distributed businesses where talented people collaborate far outside the organizational hierarchy. Sort of an intranet, 'linkedin.com'.

Blog

Blogging is a naturally social service. On the Internet, it has accelerated the collapse of the publishing industry and its online transformation. Just about anybody can be a blogger. In software companies, airlines and of course in media companies (like this one), the fundamental is sharing ideas and opinion and sometimes data. Blogs often put context around the links captured in Dogears.

Dogears

Dogears is about logging bookmarks of cool sites. Years ago, one of the early revs of this site was a list of links. Linking is a highly desirable service since it stores in a familiar place urls of relevance and interest for future reference. Less engaging than blogging, linking is still an important service.

Activities

Activities is about tracking and concentrating work items and tasks required to achieve some event, goal or milestone. Useful in software development, marketing, product management, sales and other ad hoc workflows that involve groups of people in disparate locations or processes.

Communities 

Communities assigns activities, dogears and blogs to groups of people. 

In releaee 2 of Connections (targeted for 2Q08), IBM plans to release discussion forums.