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The Business Development Day, or BDD, covered several topics and was nearly as lively as a Lotusphere Opening General Session.  The theme of the show is “The New Renaissance� and this was played up fairly consistently during the entire session.

After some general opening comments we started with the entertainment: artist Dan Dunn.  Dan, who is famous for his Paintjam improvisational on-stage painting, came up and literally wowed the audience by transforming a blank canvas and some paint into the Mona Lisa all set to music.  Mona Lisa.  Renaissance.  Get it?

Next up was Lotus Software General Manager Bob Picciano who delivered some impressive statistics and promises.  He stated that Lotus has seen 16 consecutive quarters of growth with unified communications & collaboration (UCC) growing at 2 to 4 times the current market rate and Websphere Portal leading it’s market position for seven straight years.  He gave much of the credit for growth to partners.

More important than these growth statistics was the acknowledgment of the lack of press from Lotus. Picciano said that he will lead Lotus with a more “aggressive� press and marketing strategy.  Furthermore, based on recent studies, he understands that most Lotus customers today do not understand how the entire Lotus portfolio can fit into their organization and has a plan to fix this discrepancy.

This is good news considering that Picciano later cited another survey of 1,130 organizations which claim collaboration as a top priority.  Lotus plans to see 1.8 times growth in messaging, 1.9 times growth in UCC, 1.4 times growth in portal and a whopping 2.3 times growth in social software.  Interestingly, however, while social software stands to gain the most growth based on this study, Picciano stated that UCC was going to be “white hot� in 2009.

He wrapped it up with information on Bluehouse giving a sneak peek into the announcement that will be made tomorrow, however this information is embargoed until after the OGS tomorrow so look for the announcement after 10:30am Eastern tomorrow.

Next up were the Lotus Awards finalists and winners with Best in Showcase and CTO awards to be announced tomorrow.  Congratulations to our friends over at Elguji for their Breakout Technology Award win.

Kristen Lauria, VP of Marketing and Channels was next to take the stage.  She discussed the marketing opportunities available to IBM/Lotus and demonstrated by playing a radio and television spot.

Chris Crummey came up next to demo LiveText, calendar overlays, Skype integration, Quickr file sharing, and various other Notes 8 sidebar components.  Though the demos did not go off smoothly, Chris handled the glitches with finesse.

Next to take the stage was Alistar Rennie who hosted a panel on future technologies. The panel consisted of Mary Beth Raven, Matt Flaherty, and John Boyer. To their detriment the session was running quite long at this point and the audience’s energy was beginning to wane.

Finally, guest speaker James Surowiecki, author of the best selling book The Wisdom of Crowds, came up to speak about how software such as that which Lotus makes can take advantage of the knowledge inherent in large groups of people.  He was fantastic and I most certainly want to read his book, but by this point-in-time the crowd most likely had a single unified thought: I want lunch!

All-in-all this has been a good day.  Much better than yesterday.  I meet Mikkel Heisterberg who is a very nice guy, caught up with Julian Robichaux, attempted to have lunch with Chris Whisonant and the Lotus 911 gang but the hall was so crowded that we had to split off, and then meet up with Sean Burgess on the walk back from Yach and Beach to Swan.  If anything interesting happens tonight at the reception I will blog it.

Photos are available on Flickr.