Lotus, RealNetworks pool technologies

By Paul McNamara
Network World, 10/13/98

Palm Springs, Calif. - Lotus and RealNetworks executives say the marriage of their flagship products, which was announced yesterday, will bring streaming video and audio to countless new applications and millions of worker desktops.

The companies' distribution, development and licensing deal calls for RealNetworks' RealSystem G2 technology to be melded with Lotus Notes and Domino. Notes clients will be integrated with RealPlayer G2, giving them the ability to hear and see streaming content, and, a content-creation tool called RealEncoder G2. The Domino server will be integrated with RealServer G2, Enterprise Edition.

The companies unveiled their plans at Lotus' Domino Developers Conference being held here this week. The agreement, which gives RealNetworks direct access to 25 million Lotus Notes users, is a coup for the Seattle-based company. RealNetworks is facing increasing marketplace pressure from Microsoft.

The product integration "will let a lot more people at the individual level produce" content, said Len Jordan, senior vice president at RealNetworks. Incorporating multimedia elements into Notes applications will also give customers "the ability to communicate complex ideas in a much more natural way," he added.

Applying the security services available in Domino to the RealNetworks applications will be also be a boon for customers, said Eileen Rudden, senior vice president of Lotus' Communications Product Division.

The RealNetworks technologies will be available in Versions 4.6 and 5.0 of Notes and Domino sometime early in 1999, Lotus said.

In other conference news, Lotus announced future Domino support for Microsoft's FrontPage Web development tool. The company also revealed that Domino has received BackOffice certification from Microsoft. Lotus had previously announced that Domino 5.0 will support Microsoft's Internet Information Server.

The FrontPage support, due free of charge in the first quarter of next year, will allow users to incorporate Domino design elements into their FrontPage Web sites.