IBM's Mills: Leaning toward Liberty?
Summary
Topics
The war between the two primary combatants for these turfs--Microsoft's Passport and the Liberty Alliance's Project Liberty--has bubbled over into Microsoft's antitrust remedy proceedings and will very likely stall some technology decision makers' platform decisions. Whereas numerous companies in the financial, technology, and retail sectors have taken sides, IBM has for the most part remained on the fence. According to IBM's e-business director Bob Sutor, IBM is "still neutral re: Passport and Liberty"--a story that affirmed what Lotus General Manager Al Zollar said when I interviewed him about a month ago. Zollar reports to Mills.
But if there were someone at IBM who would know which way the company was leaning, that someone would be Mills. Like other IBM officials, Mills refused to commit to Microsoft or the Liberty Alliance. In fact, in just about any meeting with IBM where Liberty's top cheerleader Sun and Microsoft are mentioned in the same sentence, company officials routinely toe the party line by responding with an answer that won't upset the delicate balance of the love triangle in which IBM finds itself.
When it comes to partnerships with other industry players, IBM's relationship with Microsoft has only one equal--its partnership with Sun. IBM collaborates with Microsoft on numerous fronts, including selling Intel-based servers and setting de facto Web services standards. At the same time, IBM is probably Microsoft's biggest competitor. Except for Microsoft Office, IBM competes with and, in some cases, leads Microsoft in every other software category. In the application server category, the foundation of IBM's market-leading WebSphere app server is none other than Sun's Java 2 Enterprise Edition. Outside of Sun itself, IBM has probably done more to advance Java's penetration into the market than any other vendor. Java is widely regarded as the No. 1 threat to Windows and IBM's support of it puts the company in a fairly duplicitous position--one that Mills shrugs off as being "great fun."
And although other officials are toeing the party line, Mills is the party leader and he didn't stop at "great fun." On the issue of Passport vs. Liberty, Mills made it clear that IBM's success depended on embracing open identity and authentication standards, and that if Microsoft didn't do the same, it would find itself in an isolated position. Citing the fact that most of the world's transactions don't take place on Windows servers, Mills talked about how Microsoft wants a piece of the data center and that getting it will mean that Microsoft will have to conform to the same identity and authentication standards that everyone else has agreed to.
According to Mills, "[Microsoft] is going to have to deal with using open standards for identity and authentication and data access and all these other pieces. Otherwise, their business is isolated to that entry point of the client, and businesses are not going to allow Microsoft to control their relationships with their customers. Customer identity is a relationship that you as a bank or a retailer have with me. My relationship is with you, not Microsoft. We need to have standards and structures that make it possible for me to have that relationship with you and vice versa and extend it and so on. It's not going to be vendor-controlled. It's just not going to happen that way."
Sounds a lot like Liberty to me.
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