Office applications Toolkit

Q&A: Lotus wakes up to social networking

Tags:
Rational,
Sametime,
Rational Software,
Yahoo

Colin Barker ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 26 Jan 2007 13:43 GMT

...that bridge between the two in a way that I think is going to be very approachable. And if we make IBM look cool along the way, that's not our business, our business is making money, so if cool can help us make money for our shareholders that could be a good thing.

Any signs of that?
I think the announcements we made were pretty cool.

So are you happy with reactions to the products?
Based on the reactions so far, I think we hit a home run. The social software stuff, I think, touched a nerve. Based on customer reaction over the last four months as we have been showing people stuff, well, that was phenomenal.

Talking to somebody at Bowstreet [a company acquired by IBM in December 2005 that makes software for speeding the development of portlets], he said the acquisition was crucial, how true was that?
The Bowstreet work is actually critical to a lot of the solutions built around portal. The dashboard framework and a lot of the cool UI stuff that was done, about dragging dashboard components into the applications, was all done through the Bowstreet capability. We bought Bowstreet for two main reasons. They had a terrific wealth of expertise in how to connect into different back-end systems. They have builders for connecting into your SAP, Peoplesoft, etc, and just quickly bring your information forward into the UI and at the same time, a really nice rapid application development capability. The combination of those two facilities has really accelerated our portal business this year.

Five years ago, Notes did not seem to have a direction; what has changed?
If you go back five years, by then most people had made their email decision, Notes or Exchange, so a lot of the focus in Lotus was experimenting in new spaces. If you look over the last few years a couple of things had happened.

One, we are re-focusing in on the core business, making sure we have the core email applications, after we've delivered what we think is a great return on investment story around the server and the capabilities on that side.

And we have been harvesting some of the experimentation that went on. What you have seen here [at Lotusphere this week] is the culmination of four years' work, to really harvest new technologies, experiment with different ways of doing things and then bring them into a much-simplified product portfolio.

I now have everything built down into five core services around messaging and calendaring with Domino, sharing information with Quickr, real-time communications with Sametime, social-networking platform with Connections and portal. We have built the technology so they are not overlapping, but synergistic.

You have so many products on show today, but no talk about identity management, access management and so on. Why is this?
Those are underlying services that we use in our collaboration products. We are building our products to plug into industry standard products for that, such as Integrity. We are being very careful in our software portfolio not to step on each other's toes, so we created boundaries across the different divisions to create a non-overlapping, complete picture for others. So where Tivoli is focusing on identity, security and storage, network management topics, we are focusing more on the end-user aspects. The end-user and collaboration services. WebSphere focuses on integration. Rational focuses on governance and application development.

My point is that we are really trying to focus from the outside in, to see what users need. At the end of the day, users don't care whose identity product you are using, they just want to know that they are talking to the right person. So our focus on the collaboration portfolios is to come at it from the outside in and on the value that they can derive from our systems.

Do you have any plans for a consumer product like Outlook Express, a product that is responsible for a lot of Microsoft's growth in consumer communications?
First of all, we are not a consumer company. Check the name, IBM is International Business Machines. And I challenge people on the assumption that a lot of growth comes from Outlook Express. I think if you look at what people are using at home, I don't think they are using Outlook Express any more. I think they are using Google Mail, Yahoo. I think they are using a lot of the "born on the web" -based email services. The phenomenon of the Outlook client at home is starting to dissipate.