Resellers revel at IBM Raven review

Resellers look set to cash in from the latest raft of products outlined at Lotus' annual European conference in Berlin last week.

Resellers look set to cash in from the latest raft of products outlined at Lotus' annual European conference in Berlin last week.

Lotus revealed earlier in the year it was working on a knowledge management (KM) tool, Yoda, that will allow organisations to manage information more tightly. But last week Jeff Papows, chief executive of Lotus, updated this by unveiling a demo suite of tools integrating Yoda and other knowledge management and collaboration tools.

Due out next year, codenamed Raven, it is based around a web portal that can link into back-end servers and discovery engines to give users a "killer application for the KM era," Papows claimed.

Using existing Lotus tools such as Sametime - its real-time chat client - location finder engines and discovery engines, Lotus showed, through Raven, how a sales team with relevant skills and experience could be assembled to collaborate on a project such as an account win.

Papows said: "At Lotus, we say collaboration is our castle. Raven is at the top of that castle."

Papows added that Lotus was developing software for ASPs, and a messaging strategy that allows customers to access email, fax, voice and paging messages from various devices.

Papows said Raven was not "vapourware", sending a veiled barb to Microsoft which is also producing tools to create knowledge management interfaces.

But Papows revealed that Lotus would be integrating Microsoft's Media Player into Notes. He said: "We must optimise for Microsoft operating systems for the mutual benefit of our customer sets."

Tracy Corbo, a senior analyst at analyst Dataquest, said KM terminology was confusing as to what it refers to. She added that leveraging the Web for collaboration, as with Raven, was the way forward.