I spoke with Joanna Smith, UPS Marketing, who has been very busy lately working with IBM to integrate shipping and visibility services within IBM’s new Lotus Live. Check out the Information Week article and read below for background about the UPS/IBM relationship and the new offering.
1. Why is UPS working with IBM?
UPS and IBM are working together to integrate UPS technologies into IBM applications – starting with Lotus Live. LotusLive is designed to allow organizations of all sizes to work and collaborate in smarter ways with an emphasis on simplicity and ease of use. Makes sense for UPS shipping and visibility services to be accessible from within this offering.
UPS is excited about the potential new customer base and this alignment with our key vertical industries through this exclusive relationship with such a well-known brand as IBM.
2. Tell me about Lotus Live?
Lotus Live is an integrated suite of tools that combines your business network with Web conferencing and collaboration capabilities, such as file storing and sharing, instant messaging, and chart creation.
Some product highlights include:
- Web meetings: You can easily host meetings and invite others to join.
- Store and share lets you share targeted business materials quickly with an entire group.
- The networking service lets you add customizable, shareable contact information and leverage social networking features to connect with others.
- Instant messaging helps you to locate a contact in the LotusLive community and start a real-time discussion with that contact.
- Forms service allows you to create a survey and quickly visualize the survey data through different types of charts, graphs, diagrams, and maps.
- You can upload or create data sets and create an instant graphical view to share with others.
3. What UPS services will be available with this offering?
IBM is licensed to use the following API’s:
- Shipping
- Tracking
- Rating and Service Selection
- Time in Transit
- Street Level Address Validation
- Drop off Locator
We are working on licensing other tools as well; more to come soon.
To see more, watch this video.
For more information on UPS Ready Program, visit ups.com/upsready.
Comments [5]
Curious why UPS cannot estimate a time of deliver and
expects people to be home from 9am to 7pm?
Its cool to see UPS using their API in a core business tool like Lotus Live. I’m hoping
to see more and more companies utilising UPS API’s to streamline the customer
experience.
If you require specific time for delivery, I would recommend using UPS express services. You can choose the option to have your package delivered before 8:00 a.m. or before 10:30 a.m. The details can be found at
http://www.ups.com/content/us/en/shipping/express-services.html?
srch_pos=1&srch_phr=express+services
We are also looking forward to the API for our customers. Many customers come to
zytara.com for UPS integrations.
From reading this and watching the video, it makes
sense as long as were integrating open tools with our
existing apps and its options like with Express or
Express Plus for international shipments. Just hope
we do not get stuck with a proprietary soltuion and end
up “cost reliant” upon another external entity like with
MS. IBM has become very “open” along with Sun in its
support and if the tools and integration efforts for this
project also remain open (i.e., clouding web2.0 and
html5.0, JAVAing w/ WebSphere, google maps with
tweet and facebook like multimedia updates over a
portable Linux), then I’m all for it. Just want to see
efforts to bring a LotusLive collaboration email (one-to-
many) application into a many-to-many “open”
application as we see being done with all our social
networking tools of today.
david… HereToServe