Lotus offers assurances to Domino customers

ORLANDO - Lotus started to regain momentum last week by throwing down the gauntlet to chief rival Microsoft and wooing end users with forthcoming products that promise to extend Domino's life and integrate the technology into a future collaboration platform.

Lotus surprised many of the more than 5,000 attendees at Lotusphere with just how far along it is in developing products that begin to integrate Domino and WebSphere, but also with its near-term commitment to the pure Domino platform.

With its product road map, Lotus also showed it is beginning to pull together its long-term strategy around collaboration with the sort of tools and software that Microsoft still is fumbling to develop and ship.

Over the next 18 to 22 months, Lotus plans to ship two versions of Domino and a pair ofcollaborative components and development tools that integrate Domino with WebSphere and DB2.

"Code talks," said new Lotus general manager Ambuj Goyal, whom IBM software chief Steve Mills sent to craft Domino into a set of collaborative components for IBM's On-Demand computing. Goyal, who built IBM's back-end WebSphere Business Integration business, says he plans to build front-end services using Domino. "The more code we ship the more people will believe that we are doing this," he says.

The strength of the Lotus stand at Lotusphere highlighted IBM's commitment to evolve its Next-Generation Domino platform and Java 2 Platform Enterprise Edition development environment.

"The evolution of Domino is happening more rapidly than I thought," said Andrew Krause, a collaboration specialist with a federal government agency. "But they also have a strong interest in not alienating Domino customers."

Sources say Lotus plans 15- to 18-month release cycles that will include a maintenance update and a version that introduces new features.

But Krause said the reality of two Domino versions, the traditional monolithic model and the set of components that run on WebSphere, means choices eventually will have to be made. "We are a WebSphere customer also, and we are already trying to rationalize two [collaboration] environments. Management will always ask us why we have both."

Just a year removed from the conceptual models presented at Lotusphere 2002, where the company showed up without having shipped a major product for three years, Lotus demonstrated products and tools that will become the foundation for Next-Generation Domino. The Next-Generation platform is a set of collaborative components such as mail and calendaring that can be embedded in applications and run on WebSphere.

"IBM has executed well over the past 12 months," says Matt Cain, an analyst with Meta Group, on the high-stakes Domino-to-WebSphere transition. "The question is, how many of the 60 million Domino users will drop out?"

While that answer will play out over many years, Cain says Lotus last week reaffirmed that Microsoft's collaboration strategy remains disjointed as the two rivals work to create sets of collaborative components and jostle for supremacy in the Web services world.