Interview: How Lotus fits into IBM's On Demand vision

This week at Lotusphere, Ambuj Goyal, general manager of Lotus Software, met with senior writer Cathleen Moore and test center analyst P.J. Connolly to discuss the future of Lotus' collaboration technology within IBM.

InfoWorld: How does Lotus plan to breathe life into what critics call a dying product?

Goyal: It is more our competition than our critics who are saying that. But we did not have at the beginning of last year a story that we could prove was the right story, so some of what they were saying was sticking in the marketplace. That is why I categorically made the statement [in the opening keynote that Lotus would not abandon Notes and Domino]. Nothing could be farther from the truth. What we are saying is, "you have been in the client/server technology business, it has delivered value to you, it will continue to deliver value to you, but we cannot move forward if you remain in that box."

We need to be able to put new network-based technologies in Notes and Domino, what I call "federating the link." Notes becomes the client-side portal for Notes users so it can access applications from Domino, J2EE, WebSphere, and even non-IBM packaged apps. By federating that link, we are improving the reach and the power of the collaboration that Domino had and the power of collaboration that Notes had, while continuing to maintain the investments that have been done in the Notes and Domino applications. [Customers] are staring to feel very comfortable that we have a path for them and they don't have to move from Notes 6 or 6.5 to some release of Workplace.

InfoWorld: How does Lotus Workplace fit into IBM's On Demand computing initiative?

Goyal: We are the human interface to On Demand. People perceive that an organization is responsive when they feel it through the interface. In a call center, when a customer gets a response faster with a better answer, they think this organization is responsive and they are satisfied. Behind that you need to integrate processes, data, and information. [Lotus] is the human interface of the On Demand strategy because we are the user interface with portal, workplace, or collaboration. Whether you are doing call center, customer portal, or Sarbanes-Oxley reporting we are the interface to that. To be an On Demand organization is to have processes integrated across the silos so you can have much faster response.

InfoWorld: Is Lotus working on an ASP model of Notes?

Goyal: It is very clear to us we are in the software not the services business. But we need to enable products so service providers can have offerings and give customers a cost structure. We are enabling partners and other service providers [to offer an ASP version] because we don't want to be in the hosting business.

InfoWorld: Do you see Oracle's Collaboration Suite as a competitive threat?

Goyal: Oracle is a big software producer and they have presence and many customers and they have access to many more customers, so they will be competition. But if you need security, the functionality, cost of ownership, road map to the future, and collaboration applications [there is no direct comparison]. It is no longer about e-mail and IM. Those are nice-to-have technologies. It is about how organizations collaborate across the enterprise to be productive. That is organizational productivity. We will compete yes, and we will win as many as we can.

InfoWorld: Why should a company buy Notes/Domino/Workplace or move from Exchange or another competitor to Lotus?