Lotus evolves toward WebSphere

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

InfoWorld: Domino was probably the first major application to arrive on the Linux platform. How's Linux going with regards to the Lotus IBM strategy?

Zollar: Linux has been very interesting. We did have an effort inside Lotus to deliver [Domino on Linux] in late 1999. There were some challenges that had to do with the way things like threading and the Linux kernel worked. We were not able to get very high concurrency levels with that implementation. So there wasn't really a lot of strong customer adoption. The Lotus engineering team that works on server platform issues got into the open-source model and actually created a set of kernel changes, posted them into the open-source community. We now have levels of concurrency that match or beat Windows, in terms of the number of concurrent users that you can get on a download Linux server. That was really a first critical step for us to accomplish. Now we're starting to see lots more interest. If you [look at] the Notes and Domino 6 beta site, we've been running steadily at over 15 percent of our downloads being Linux, which certainly is not a representation of deployment but certainly is representative of interest. We expect that interest to continue into some real serious deployments.

InfoWorld: What do you see as the impact of the blade server phenomenon on Lotus' plans to componentize its architecture?

Zollar: While we haven't shipped the blade product yet, having this is a major differentiator between us and Microsoft. The fact that we are on multiple platforms and on platforms like Linux allow us to take advantage of these technologies as they become attractive to customers. One of the big issues that I hear from customers is that the cost of running large numbers of distributed servers, particularly Windows distributed servers, has been excessive for a long time. It's at a pain point where ... many of them are looking at alternative platforms, like the Unix platform or the Linux platform, or some early discussions around things like blades. We are well positioned to take advantage of those developments in the marketplace. Microsoft is much less so.

InfoWorld: One area where Lotus was seen to be way ahead was in the wireless space, but you seem to have had some difficulty in bringing the wireless connector architecture to the marketplace.

Zollar: It was pretty clear to us that wireless adoption was happening first in EMEA [Europe, Middle East, Asia] and WAP was going to be the hot thing. So we prioritized implementations around WAP above other wireless implementations. As it turns out, WAP isn't doing as well as many people thought. So our strategy has been re-set to allow us to support a wide range of these devices. It takes time to roll that out, but we're making steady progress and we've got many customers who are deploying a wide range of devices from PocketPCs to BlackBerrys, to WAP devices. We're certainly making progress. Still, I would agree that there's a lot more that we need to do.

InfoWorld: Do you think that you're hurt by IBM's reluctance to get into the hardware side of PDAs and devices such as the Tablet PC?

Zollar: I think the opposite. I think we're helped by that because I think we'd have a much more difficult time in talking to companies like Research in Motion or startups like Good Technology if we had a device that we were marketing from IBM. The fact that IBM has taken a support-of-multiple-devices approach really allows us to have much better conversations with all of these companies.