Lotus evolves toward WebSphere

AS GENERAL MANAGER for Lotus Software Group, Al Zollar has weathered the many challenges that followed that company’s acquisition by IBM, including migrating core Notes technologies to the WebSphere platform. Zollar met with InfoWorld Test Center Director Steve Gillmor and News Editor Mark Jones to discuss Lotus’ relationship with IBM, his opinion of rivals such as Groove Networks, and the overriding importance of listening to customers.

InfoWorld: Where is Lotus is today in terms of the upcoming release of R6 and also the integration of Lotus technologies with IBM?

If you look over the next three years, Notes and Domino 6 are part of a spending string that will total over $1 billion of investment around Lotus technologies. We have customers from very diverse industries. Genencor, a big biotech company out of California, [is] doing some very interesting things around Sametime. If you look at Hertz, they run the company on Notes and bought pretty much the entire product line. I could go on with a number of customers that would say [Notes] really does meet [their] business needs. We expect that to continue with the delivery of R6.

In the bigger context the question is, “Where are collaborative technologies going?” And that’s what Lotus’ plans are really geared to over the next few years. [There is] a lot of talk [at Lotus] about contextual collaboration [and] the whole idea of embedding collaboration as an API inside of applications, as opposed to having it be a standalone application, which is how it’s predominantly consumed today. We are investing to make sure that all of our collaborative capabilities can be consumed in that way — so online awareness and e-meetings can be consumed inside of CRM applications, taking advantage of the latest Web technologies as well as Web services.

InfoWorld: What is your reaction to [Groove Networks founder] Ray Ozzie pointing out in his Weblog that some developers believe the issue of cross-enterprise collaboration is handled more effectively by the Groove environment than by Lotus Domino?

Zollar: It’s an interesting idea, because if you just take a [poll of] customers you would come to a different answer. GE would be a great example of one of our customers that has Lotus collaborative technologies like QuickPlace that they’re using to collaborate [with] their business partners and suppliers. Avnet is another customer who’s using Sametime extensively to collaborate with their customers in a client support role. If you look at the facts of customer acceptance and customer deployment, we have tons and tons, thousands of customers. Groove is an experiment that has no customers. Those are the realities of the world as it exists today.

InfoWorld: Groove may be an experiment, but it’s an experiment that is backed by Microsoft, and there’s been a lot said about their significant role in the evolution of Office .Net and Exchange.

Zollar: I think Microsoft has a very, very confused road map. They’ve got a dual-object model in place right now. You have the complex object model that’s built around Exchange today, and you’ve got the coming .Net model. These things do not integrate all that well today. They’ve got an interim release of Exchange that’s before the next re-architected release — and their customers’ incredible migration pains getting to Exchange 2000, which many of them are still suffering with. So you add Groove to the mix and it adds yet another dimension of confusion. We’ve been in shootouts with Groove and we beat them easily, and I mean easily, because the deploy capabilities and the experience we’ve got is just not in the same league.

InfoWorld: Have you considered starting a Weblog like Ray?

Zollar: It’s an interesting idea. [Ray] has to use everything he can to get word out about his products because you know when they go head to head, as we recently did with a big financial services company, they get ranked very low by comparison to what we can do. He’s gotta do those things and we could do similar things as well, but we will try to stay centered though on customer success. One of the problems that many folks in this industry are having is all the vendor hype, [which] doesn’t get down to the core issues that are resonating in the economy today, [namely], how do you reduce cost so that you get more employee productivity? How do you really deal with the challenges of the business environment over the next couple of years? Our research has shown us that customers have become pretty sophisticated and they really believe our customer stories, they don’t believe vendor hype.

InfoWorld: Where is the road map for knowledge management, as opposed to the collaboration and messaging platforms for Lotus?

Zollar: Knowledge management is a term that’s been used in the industry for a while, and I think it’s suffered a bit because the defining [concepts] are too long. We find a lot of customers losing interest in that as a term. [But] we think this knowledge discovery technology that we’ve got in the Lotus Discovery group is really a breakthrough and important technology. It has the ability to spider and scan lots and lots of content, including blogs, and deliver insight about the content, which is what people are looking for given the content explosion.

InfoWorld: Is the portal evolving as something that can bridge these two worlds?

Zollar: Absolutely. The portal is really the place where contextual collaboration will happen first. It becomes an integration point for content management. With our portal offerings we can bring in different types of content management. It can be the delivery point for other applications, and it’s highly customizable to the work environment. This notion of dynamic workplace that IBM is delivering really is this notion of how do you take all work-related activities that are associated with an individual employee and provision them with a set of portlets that are very job-specific and role-specific. Putting search in that kind of context, expertise location in that kind of context, content management in that context, is a very powerful integrating point.

InfoWorld: What do you have to say to developers’ concerns that Domino and Notes have a difficult time being adopted by the business user?

Zollar: We estimate that at least half of our customers have developed some form of Notes and Domino application. A good number of those have enterprise applications, so the majority of them would be departmental or functional applications. And I think what we’re really seeing when we talk to our customers is that there are a lot of applications that are centered around workflow, forms routing, approval processes, those kind of applications for which you can’t find a better technology to build and deploy them. There are literally tens of thousands — we estimate $10 billion worth of investment over time — of labor into Notes and Domino applications. They range from small applications that are single-user, power-user types of applications to applications that are deployed enterprisewide doing HR functions, and other kinds of application functions. When you look at our evolution, almost all of those Notes applications have been built inside the firewall — they’ve been internal collaborative applications. The real breakthrough with QuickPlace [a browser-based collaboration tool built on top of Notes] was that it gave us the capability to begin to accelerate the movement of these applications across the firewall, and especially for project collaborative types of applications which are a good portion of the classic Notes Domino applications.

InfoWorld: How you expect to use technologies like QuickPlace and Sametime to move away from the native Notes construct and into the WebSphere realm?

Zollar: It’s not a question of moving away, it’s a question of [evolution]. Until the past year or so, we’ve built products in a very product-oriented fashion, with separate product APIs and separate connect points. What our customers have really been saying to us is, “We want the ability to look at collaboration as a set of capabilities that we can deliver to any application that we need.” We’ve had to begin to componentize and modularize certain functions that are part of the core Notes/Domino capability, as well as capabilities like Sametime and other products. A great example of that is the Domino offline services capability. By componentizing essentially a Notes server, and putting that into a smaller install package, we’ve provided the ability to have offline browser access with high Notes capability. That’s just an example of the first step, which I would describe as modularization.

The next step is to make sure that we have more consistent, Java-oriented APIs that allow these things to be built into applications. Sametime is a great example, where you can look at any Web-based application, and as long as you have a name and a directory, you can Sametime-enable that application to tell the user whether someone is online at that moment or not. That is an example of that next stage, using the Java APIs to embed online awareness [into applications].

The [third] stage is about taking and applying the common Web services and J2EE set of APIs to the collaborative interfaces so that you can deliver these collaborative capabilities inside of applications. The first step is componentization, the second step is standardizing the API system, and the third step is the delivery of Web services and eventually a new Web services platform.

InfoWorld: How would you rate the success of the IBM acquisition and the transition moving forward to the WebSphere environment?

Zollar: We would rate ourselves pretty highly. Whenever you talk about transition you have to take a lot of time to explain it. Customers know what they have, and when you talk about a transition, you’re talking about something in the future, and by definition it’s less certain than what you have. I certainly didn’t have an expectation that I’d go down to Lotusphere and do one speech and have it be clear to everybody. I’ve said to many people on the Lotus team this takes staying on message and delivering — that’s what helps people understand, it helps people allay their concerns.

This has been a phenomenal success. We’ve got Verizon, with over 100,000 seats deployed, achieving over five times availability with this infrastructure. Just incredible customer examples that we’ve created. I find it interesting that people seem to want to diminish the accomplishments of Lotus, because if you look at the number of seats we’ve got deployed, it’s beyond AOL, in terms of their client mail system. It’s beyond what Microsoft has in terms of their MSN subscriber base.

InfoWorld: How will the Lotus platform evolve in the Web services standards debate?

Zollar: The Web services initiative is an IBM software initiative [and] we are full participants in that initiative. Web services are going to allow application functions such as Notes Domino as well as other enterprise applications to be componentized and modularized and delivered in much smaller and appropriate clumps. Contextual collaboration is exactly this concept.

InfoWorld: What’s your take on the Web services development kits that Microsoft announced recently?

Zollar: We’re all in favor of Microsoft delivering development kits that support the Web services standards, because it will allow us the kind of interoperability and integration that our customers really want. At the end of the day, customers really have had to put up with a lot of challenges in trying to integrate things that have no fundamental architecture that allowed them to integrate or tie together well. Web services help that, and the work that Microsoft does to support Web services I applaud. That will be one of the ways that we connect with a lot of their technologies, and we’ll also have implementations supported with the IBM set of products.

InfoWorld: In terms of the road map for Domino Designer, are you going to be collaborating with the WebSphere team and Eclipse project?

Zollar: Absolutely. We can think of the RAD tools that we’re building as being an Eclipse-based tool that is oriented toward the Domino Designer paradigm of development. Our design point and goal was to make not only the development experience, but many of the other facts associated with the Notes and Domino development capabilities, transform into this new environment in an evolutionary step. We describe this as two parallel paths on a highway. We have our core technology which we will continue to update with [Release] 6, and the release beyond 6, and we will have our next-gen technology, and there will be bridges that allow customers to take advantage of the best of both worlds.

InfoWorld: When will we see the first of this effort?

Zollar: The first deliveries will be next year. We haven’t laid out the dates explicitly, but we will be delivering both in beta as well as in final form capabilities around next year, in 2003.

InfoWorld: Domino was probably the first major application to arrive on the Linux platform. How’s Linux going with regards to the Lotus IBM strategy?

Zollar: Linux has been very interesting. We did have an effort inside Lotus to deliver [Domino on Linux] in late 1999. There were some challenges that had to do with the way things like threading and the Linux kernel worked. We were not able to get very high concurrency levels with that implementation. So there wasn’t really a lot of strong customer adoption. The Lotus engineering team that works on server platform issues got into the open-source model and actually created a set of kernel changes, posted them into the open-source community. We now have levels of concurrency that match or beat Windows, in terms of the number of concurrent users that you can get on a download Linux server. That was really a first critical step for us to accomplish. Now we’re starting to see lots more interest. If you [look at] the Notes and Domino 6 beta site, we’ve been running steadily at over 15 percent of our downloads being Linux, which certainly is not a representation of deployment but certainly is representative of interest. We expect that interest to continue into some real serious deployments.

InfoWorld: What do you see as the impact of the blade server phenomenon on Lotus’ plans to componentize its architecture?

Zollar: While we haven’t shipped the blade product yet, having this is a major differentiator between us and Microsoft. The fact that we are on multiple platforms and on platforms like Linux allow us to take advantage of these technologies as they become attractive to customers. One of the big issues that I hear from customers is that the cost of running large numbers of distributed servers, particularly Windows distributed servers, has been excessive for a long time. It’s at a pain point where … many of them are looking at alternative platforms, like the Unix platform or the Linux platform, or some early discussions around things like blades. We are well positioned to take advantage of those developments in the marketplace. Microsoft is much less so.

InfoWorld: One area where Lotus was seen to be way ahead was in the wireless space, but you seem to have had some difficulty in bringing the wireless connector architecture to the marketplace.

Zollar: It was pretty clear to us that wireless adoption was happening first in EMEA [Europe, Middle East, Asia] and WAP was going to be the hot thing. So we prioritized implementations around WAP above other wireless implementations. As it turns out, WAP isn’t doing as well as many people thought. So our strategy has been re-set to allow us to support a wide range of these devices. It takes time to roll that out, but we’re making steady progress and we’ve got many customers who are deploying a wide range of devices from PocketPCs to BlackBerrys, to WAP devices. We’re certainly making progress. Still, I would agree that there’s a lot more that we need to do.

InfoWorld: Do you think that you’re hurt by IBM’s reluctance to get into the hardware side of PDAs and devices such as the Tablet PC?

Zollar: I think the opposite. I think we’re helped by that because I think we’d have a much more difficult time in talking to companies like Research in Motion or startups like Good Technology if we had a device that we were marketing from IBM. The fact that IBM has taken a support-of-multiple-devices approach really allows us to have much better conversations with all of these companies.

InfoWorld: When you started at Lotus in your current job, Lou Gerstner was still in charge. How are things working with the new CEO and where do you see Lotus technologies in the architecture stack of IBM?

Zollar: There has been a great deal of consistency in collaboration between Lou and Sam Palmisano, so there is really no difference at my level. IBM is our biggest customer still and I tend to have a lot of discussions with senior executives at IBM around how we’re using Lotus technology. We have over 300,000 employees who use Notes. We have over 225,000 who use Sametime, and that number is growing every day. We do 4,800, I think it’s up to 6,000 hours now a month of Net meetings [that save] $4 [million] to $6 million a month.

InfoWorld: How do Lotus technologies intersect with IBM Global Services?

Zollar: We view Global Services as a very significant and strategic partner. We have several capabilities that they deliver around a Lotus stream [of products] and we expect there will be more in the future. Global Services is the largest services company in the industry, and it will continue to hold that moniker as they evolve. It will be foolish for us not to find ways to work with them to serve our customers.

We’re fortunate to have customers like GE and IBM, [with] 340,000 Sametime users; I’ll tell you they have driven our requirements to make the product better. You look at guys like Groove, and some of our other competitors — they are just no where near that — and they don’t get those good customer feedback loops. At the end of the day, if you don’t have customers you’re nothing.