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?

Zollar: 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. Conservative estimates would say that probably, since the inception of Notes, $10 billion worth of application investment has been put into it around the world from our customers as well as our business partners.

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.