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 COLUMN
Empire strikes back I FINALLY HEARD BACK from IBM about a column I recently wrote. No, it wasn't one of the several about IBM's faux-standards Web Services Interoperability Organization scheme with Microsoft. Flushed with success at keeping Sun out of the loop with bogus term limits, IBM's standards boss, Bob Sutor, remains apparently unconcerned that an important opportunity has been tarnished by Tammany Hall tactics. Congrats, Bob -- have another cigar.
In an interview with InfoWorld News Editor Mark Jones and me (go to http://www.infoworld.com/interviews), Al's message is simple: customers, customers, customers. "We're sitting with tens of thousands of customers well deployed around the world. We estimate that people send over 2 billion e-mail messages a day throughout the Notes infrastructure." And Zollar puts the total of Notes application investments from customers and business partners at $10 billion. Zollar's biggest customer is Big Blue. "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," he corrects himself, "I think it's up to 6,000 hours now a month of Net meetings [that save] 4 to 6 million dollars a month." But what about Notes developers and business partners who wake up each day to a new world of cross-enterprise collaboration requirements, where peer technologies like Groove will soon play alongside Microsoft's Office .Net platform? "When you look at our evolution, almost all of those Notes applications have been built inside the firewall -- they've been internal collaborative applications," Zollar recounts. "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 those project collaborative types of classic Notes/Domino applications," he says. Zollar quickly lists the customers of these new Notes and Notes-related technologies. GE uses QuickPlace to enable collaboration between business partners and suppliers; Avnet uses the SameTime IM platform to collaborate with customers in a client support role. "If you look at the facts of customer acceptance," he says, "and customer deployment, we have tons and tons of customers, thousands of customers. Groove is an experiment that has no customers." Ouch, Al, don't sugarcoat it. He continues the Dance of the Incumbent: "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 nowhere near that -- and they don't get those good customer feedback loops." But Al, Groove has a big customer too: Big Red. "Microsoft has a very, very confused road map," Zollar counters. "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." Zollar keeps the hits coming: "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." Zollar faces problems of his own in migrating the core Notes technologies to IBM's WebSphere platform. "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," he explains. "I certainly didn't have an expectation that I'd go down to LotusSphere 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." "Until the past year or so, we've built the products in a very product-oriented fashion, with separate product APIs and separate connect points that all these products can deliver all around the theme of helping people work together in groups," he says. Zollar's road map: componentization of the core Notes/Domino, QuickPlace, and SameTime services; Java-oriented standardization of the APIs; delivery as Web services; "and eventually a new Web Services platform." Zollar promises "an Eclipse-based tool that is oriented toward the Domino Designer paradigm of development." As we wind up our chat, I suggest that, taking a page from Ray Ozzie's Notesbook, Al should consider a Weblog of his own. "It's an interesting idea," Al allows. "[Ray] has to use everything he can to get word out about his products, because 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 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." At the end of the day, if you don't have customers, you're nothing, right? Yes, Al, the "customer" is always right, especially if it's IBM. Steve Gillmor is director of the InfoWorld Test Center. You can reach him at steve_gillmor@infoworld.com.  RELATED SUBJECTS  Web TechnologiesClick here for all of Steve Gillmor's past columns. SPONSORED WHITE PAPERS 
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