Lotus evolves toward WebSphere

General Manager Al Zollar talks about IBM, Groove, and the importance of listening to customers

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?