Lotus evolves toward WebSphere

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

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.