Lotusphere 97: The Lotus Meeters

This year?s Lotusphere found Lotus with a clear and coherent strategy ? one that includes IBM and challenges Microsoft. Tim Phillips was there to check out the products that will take on Exchange and Office

This year?s Lotusphere was an opportunity for Lotus to show that the past year of ?getting to know you? with IBM has been worth it: and that the whole was really greater than the sum of its parts. If it makes good its predictions for the year, that?ll be the case.

Unlike Lotusphere 1996, which was uncharacteristically low-key for the normally jolly Lotus staffers, this year?s show had more hype, more confidence and, crucially, more product to back it up.

It wasn?t short of vapourware though: as is the fashion for the big developer conferences, Lotusphere (and its new baby brother, Nice?s Lotusphere Europe) telescoped the entire year?s announcements into one keynote and a couple of press conferences. If there are any Business Partners leaving Lotusphere this year confident that they can just call up their distributor to get hold of the new Notes client, the native AS/400 edition of Domino, or Domino?s electronic commerce server, then they may be on hold for quite a while.

But Lotus did give a clear picture of where it?s going, and that is sailing the good ship Domino at ramming speed towards Microsoft?s Exchange and Outlook.

It?s fashionable to deny that your products are direct competitors to other major software releases, but there?s no doubt that with Domino and Components, Lotus wants to replace, or at least dent, Exchange and Microsoft Office.

?You?ll find that people live in a messaging environment, theydon?t live in a spreadsheet,? says Lotus senior VP of the emerging product group Larry Moore, catching the Microsoft-baiting tone of the event.

?I believe that Domino is an Exchange killer. Just look at the volumes we?re shipping,? said Cary Alexandre, senior product manager for Lotus?s network computer desktop, joining in the knockabout.

The network computer, Notes databases, Java and Lotus Components seem finally to have settled into a coherent strategy, which gains some advantage from the IBM alliance beyond a blank cheque for development.

Briefly, Notes 4.5 is now Domino, powered by Lotus Notes. With an internal Web server and servers on multiple platforms, Lotus is aiming for System/390 and AS/400 versions of Domino by the end of 1997. New clients for Notes, or Domino, are called Outlook and Maui. The first is due in the summer, the second at the end of the year. The idea? To provide a client that supports Web and Notes formats with a common interface, and one that integrates with desktop applications.

There will also be a bunch of more specific clients ? for example a POP3 client and lots of internet-based add-ons for Domino. The first is Domino Merchant, an e-commerce server. Components are here to stay: version 1.1 of the Active X-based Components are available, but causing more of a rumpus: the first Components called Kona, one of the last coffee metaphors left unused by the computer industry. Kona?s job is to provide the interface for IBM?s network computer, which Lotus helped to design.

As a senior player in Kona?s development, Alexandre proclaimed it as the hit of Lotusphere. ?Judging by the orders we?ve taken in the past two weeks I?d say the network computer is a practical alternative to the PC,? he said. ?We?ve got customers who

want to deploy tens of thousands of them.?

There has certainly been interest in Kona?s ability to extend the life of the mainframe by connecting to a native Domino AS/400 or System/ 390 server. That means that Domino can become an ideal intranet server, says Inteco research analyst Mark Snowden. ?Intranet use will fuel any growth in network upgrades. There?s got to be a migration path for mainframe users. This is a sensible move.?

But IDC?s assistant managing analyst Ian Brown says that there?s still work to be done. ?It?s not a very tidy architecture at the moment and needs tarting up, and in the short term the NC will not be as reliable or as robust as the old terminal. Realistically, I?m not so sure it will be an immediate success.?

Lotus? Alexandre says that for Components and Kona to be a success, Lotus has to convince users that they don?t need the functionality of Smart Suite or Office.

He says: ?These Components are very lightweight. They have about 80 per cent of the functionality of PC applications and this is absolutely the right way to go, but if you are a hard core PC user, you are not going to change.?

Lotus internet products manager Victor Aberdeen prefers to concentrate on the internet strategy for Domino, even floating the idea of a channel-free model for software distribution. He says: ?With our service provider version of Domino, you can use Components on the server, instead of locally. That means that you can use Components off the wire. It?s like buying them on the wire, but you never buy them. The application stays on the wire.?

This might be a long way off if we?re talking about software distribution to the home. ?The UK is moving, but it is not ready for this technology yet. I?m not expecting any major rollouts this year,? Aberdeen admits.

Look forward to some of the IBM millions being spent on advertising too. Aberdeen concedes that Microsoft is the master of stimulating demand through marketing, but in 1997, Lotus will be fighting back. ?Microsoft will continue to make noise, but it has to deliver. We?re going to be running TV advertisements for Domino this year, and we?re taking Domino out of that PC environment,? he says.

Nevertheless, the Gartner Group predicts 4 million upgrades to Exchange server this year. If Microsoft genuinely doesn?t deliver, then a lot of people will know about it, even without Lotus advertising.

And after all the Microsoft jokes and digs at Bill Gates, Domino?s success, either on the Lan or the network computer, relies on customers being brave enough to prove Microsoft wrong.

Domino and Exchange ? what?s the difference?

With the imminent release of Exchange 5 (now beta testing at 450 sites in the UK, and shipping in March according to Microsoft), there is, in political terms, ?clear blue water? between Exchange and Domino.

Both products set about achieving the same goal: an internet-enabled organisation connected with a universal messaging infrastructure, using workflow to make the messaging environment central to the workplace. There, though, the similarity ends.

While, superficially, they are very similar, Domino and Notes come at the problem of messaging and workflow from different ends. Notes is built around a database. This makes it excellent for workflow and shared data, but less happy when integrating with desktop applications.

Exchange grafts a messaging infrastructure on to Windows NT, coupling it tightly with Office 97. It?s good as an evolution from email, less comfortable supporting groupware and workflow. Platforms and standards

Lotus now has a huge range of Domino platforms. There?s 32-bit Windows, Netware, OS/2, AIX, HP-UX and Solaris. There are clients for Mac, OS/2 and Windows. In addition, later this year we will get AS/400 and System/390 server versions.

In its favour, there?s a solution for every network. But the problem is continued development costs for Lotus, plus the difficulty of optimising for every operating system.

Nevertheless, tight coupling is possible ? for example, under NT, Notes inherits its security from NT?s single login. Exchange hasn?t actually ventured beyond the NT server and Microsoft says there are no plans for it to do so, either.

According to Microsoft, connectivity to other platforms means that there?s no need, and the tighter integration between Exchange and add-ons like Internet Information Server (IIS) and Merchant Server make the difference. Clients

Lotus announced a bewildering number of clients at Lotusphere. Outlook will replace Notes? Client in the middle of the year. Maui will replace Outlook at the end of the year. Both support internet messaging standards, with Lotus claiming they leapfrog Exchange?s support for the internet. Rather ambitiously, Maui promises to also be the user?s desktop. But also at Lotusphere, we saw cc:mail client 8. If Lotus wants to push Domino, why confuse the market?

Microsoft?s Mail and Outlook clients are, of course, bundled with the operating system and Office, at least in the Windows environment.

Although there?s a Mac client, the interface is slightly different. Nevertheless, with millions of Mail clients already on the market, and supporting most internet mail standards already, many Notes users may find themselves using a Microsoft client.

Whatever happened to Novell and Netscape?

Although the knockabout at Lotusphere centred on the battle between Lotus and Microsoft for the groupware desktop, there are a couple of other players involved: remember Novell and Netscape?

Lotus?s Victor Aberdeen doesn?t have much time for either. ?Novell has to do a lot of work to make Groupwise competitive. There are good ideas in there, but overall it doesn?t hack it in the wider context of applications.? But, he adds, Novell will be a committed competitor because Groupwise is now a major part of the company?s revenue stream.

Aberdeen has an architectural complaint about Netscape?s Communicator. ?We said we would go along with a thin client, and we have stayed with a thin client. Netscape, on the other hand, is moving towards a thicker client [than its Web browser] for groupware. It can?t do it all on the server.? Netscape, he says, will have considerable trouble getting over its ?young pretender? status when it comes to selling groupware rather than giving away a browser.

There?s backing for Aberdeen from the Gartner Group. In a 1996 report, Gartner Group analyst Eric Brown said Netscape was ?exposed as not ready for the enterprise?? it would take a year to catch up with Notes and Exchange, he added. Novell, by contrast, would suffer not through functionality, but because it was not considered strategically.

He?s even supported by Microsoft?s Phil Cross. ?In the corporate market Notes is our main competition, without a doubt. Netscape gets amazing awareness from corporates, but you?re not seeing it in the sales figures yet. When you talk to businesses about how they want to enhance their messaging, they want to use their existing X.400 backbone. Netscape?s answer is to tell them to use the internet. Oh, yeah. Corporates just don?t do that.?