Zollar unplugged: Part 1

On the eve of Lotusphere, Lotus General Manager Al Zollar talks about Domino vs. Exchange, the promise of Rnext, information overload, the future of collaboration, and more, in part one of an exclusive interview with Tech Update editorial director David Berlind.

Tech Update: As a leader of a technology company, you have to have your own IT roadmap, as well as a roadmap for your customers. So, knowing what you know about the future of technology, what should be the top five priorities for business and technology executives?

Zollar's Top 5 IT Priorities
		Lotus' general manager says IT and business managers should focus on solutions that address these top five challenges: 1. Information overload 2. Total cost of ownership (TCO) of technology 3. Return on investment 4. Locating and retaining tech expertise 5. Ongoing training to keep up with the rate of change
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Zollar: The five priorities, I think, are tied to challenges that they're dealing with--that organizations deal with. I'll tell you one that I hear about all the time from people is information overload. There was a study recently by the University of California, Berkeley, which said that in the next three years, the world will generate as much information as has been generated in the preceding 300,000 years of the entire course of human history. And, I think most of us feel like it's headed toward our inbox. So, how do I deal with this massive onslaught of data? I've got too many e-mails. It's all in the area of information overload. I think that there's also great concern--especially in this economy--about return on investment and total cost of ownership--really getting the most out of what I'm spending on these technology investments that I make. Organizations are very concerned about retention of expertise. I hear that all the time.

The retirement-eligible population inside of many organizations is starting to frighten them. The U.S. Government is probably the best example. And, just consider the rapid rate of change that we're living in. Going back as far as five years, I think, all of us believe that the world moved a little slower. Now that it seems to be moving faster and faster, the question is: Are the organizations and teams that are critical to our success keeping up with it?

Tech Update: So, what is Lotus doing to help businesses address those priorities and do you practice what you preach?

Zollar: That set of problems--that set of priorities--are many of the things that we focus on in providing solutions for Lotus. We like to think of ourselves as being the people part of e-business. We enable the minds of e-business by focusing on tools that help people communicate and collaborate with each other, tools that help people really deal with information overload, knowledge gaps, and all these other challenges that organizations face. As for how we are using it here at Lotus, we have a mantra around here of "we eat what we sell." Some call it eating your own dog food. We have members of our staff who rail at the thought of eating dog food. But we certainly use our products very heavily. Everybody at Lotus is a Notes user and a SameTime user. We've got some tremendous use of e-learning to deal with this rate of change since we've increased the rate as which we're introducing new products. If we have a new salesperson that comes on board, their sales training experience is an e-learning experience as well as their overall training as a part of IBM. We're using our knowledge-management tools to help filtrate the right information to our sales specialists. We called it the KNAC. Knowledge Architecture Center is what I believe KNAC stands for. It is our portal that allows our sales people to get information on competitors' products, our latest wins and all the great news about our current product set. We believe very, very strongly in implementing this stuff for our own folks. The end result is getting more productivity out of your people, getting more out of less. That's what all of us are faced with. And, again, I think that's what Lotus software helps customers do.

Tech Update: Lotus' annual love-fest--Lotusphere--is coming up. What's going to be the big takeaway for your attendees?

Zollar: We're going to talk a lot about our vision. We're going to talk about the way that we see our collaborative technologies evolving. Lotus invented collaboration. A lot of people have given us credit for that. And, we certainly have been very successful in providing collaborative solutions to customers in 80 countries around the world--all over different industries. It's been a real tremendous thing to be a part of. But, people want to know what's happening next with collaboration. They see a lot of small start-ups, and they think--maybe these guys have some interesting ideas. The world wants to hear from Lotus in terms of our vision of collaboration; that collaboration moves from being a separate application to being a feature in every application that people use. So, stated another way--you don't want to have to jump into your e-mail program to send an e-mail. You want to be able to do it in-line with the work processes that you are involved with. So, suppose you've got a portal that aggregates the kinds of things that you are interested in. If you're working with a CRM application or a supply chain application, you want to be able to deal with the collaborative capabilities in that context. So, we are introducing a technology vision that will support this evolution to the next generation of collaboration.

Tech Update: Now that Release 5 [of the Notes client and Domino Server] have been out for a while, what percentage of your customers who have developed custom applications have gone with Java instead of LotusScript? That was a really important part of opening up your whole architecture. How successful has that been?

Zollar: I would say that about half our customer base is doing unique applications around the Domino Notes Environment. And, of those probably 80 percent are using LotusScript. But, there's been a great deal of interest in Java. We have seen, across IBM--and certainly Lotus has been a part of that--a great interest in Java, especially J2EE and also the rest of the Java technologies. And we're seeing a growing use of that. That's part of what we'll talk about when we discuss the roadmap for our next generation technologies [at Lotusphere].

Tech Update: Are you going to provide tools to help people migrate from LotusScript to Java, or any other programming environment for that matter?

Zollar: Our view of migration is that we want to give customers the opportunity to use new things, while protecting the old things that they've used. Protecting customers' investments is a critical part of what we do. So, it is not as much a migration as it is "co-existence." How do you allow customers to do what they need to do, in the new environments, while they can continue to get productive use out of the existing environments that they've invested in?

Tech Update: Does that mean yes? Will there be something that will help them move onto Java?

Zollar: That means yes. But we see migration as being more of a co-existence. As customers build new applications, they'll be building them with new languages. Migrating from one language to another has always been something that's rather tricky in computer science. It doesn't matter whether you're going from Cobol to C or from C to Java: Language migration tools have always been problematic. So, the issue really has been--how do I protect the existing code that I write? [How do I] make it useful, and work in the environments that I use while I build the new code and the new languages?

Tech Update: The next upgrade for Notes and Domino--Rnext--is now in beta. When do you expect the code to freeze? Will it be called Release 6? And when will it ship to customers?

Zollar: Those are things that you'll have to come to Lotusphere to hear. Those are things that we want to be more specific about at Lotusphere. But to address the question--at least partially--[Rnext] is more into beta use (as opposed to testing). We've already got the quality and deployment criteria from those close customers and partners that are involved in the beta program (including, of course, IBM) that will drive its readiness. That being said, I assume that Rnext is undergoing serious evaluation, too, and it will be ready for customers in the second half of this year. Deployment activity will, I'm sure, begin occurring in 2003--probably even a little before.

Tech Update: When it ships, what will be Rnext's biggest enhancements over its predecessors?

Zollar: Oh, it's got lots of capabilities. Not the least of which is this whole focus on total cost of ownership. As I've said, most companies have established an infrastructure around messaging and collaboration. And most of them have picked us. A few have picked something else [Editor's note: Reference to Microsoft Exchange]. But, for the ones who have picked us, we certainly hear from them that now that they've got this in place, they want to improve the total cost of ownership and improve the quality of service delivery and scalability. Improve integration with systems management capability such as those from Tivoli that allow us to keep up the quality of service delivery. Getting our customers to five nines availability [Editor's note: Five-nines, or 99.999% availability is a reference to near perfect uptime]. Consistently, we have customers who are achieving that. We want to be able to provide the services and capability that really allow all of our customers to achieve that--as well as things like greatly improved replication. (Something Microsoft still hasn't figured out.) The ability to use less bandwidth with some nice compression algorithms. Being able to give people more fine-grained control over replication: what you replicate from, the size of the permitted replica, how replicatable documents deal with attachments (that drives all of us crazy). Those are some of the things that Rnext will feature.

Tech Update: When Release 5 came out, Lotus had some challenges getting companies to upgrade to it. Some estimates showed that by the middle of last year--roughly half of the Release 4 shops had upgraded. What percentage of your customers are still on Release 4?

Zollar: We think about 60 percent of our installed base [is on Release 5], and about 80 percent when you look at the server. That, as you know, is a pretty good result. We had a problem: that release was timed with this little event called Y2K. So a lot of our company missed a lot of our customer's Y2K windows. It was a slower ramp than we have seen in the past. But if I look at the number of customers who've [upgraded from Exchange 5.5] to Exchange 2000 in the time that it's been out--we are well ahead of their deployment rate with Release 5. So again, as infrastructures become more mission critical, and part of the fabric, it will take customers longer to make changes to new releases. And that's one of the reasons that we're not shipping new releases every six months, or every year.

Tech Update: What will Lotus do differently to lure its customer base more rapidly to Rnext, and will there be a direct upgrade path from Release 4 to Rnext?

Zollar: Yes, Release 4 will be protected in the upgrade path. We'll be doing lots more things than we did before [including] the ability to have better client deployment options. The client deployment piece has usually been the thing that's slowed our customers down. Having more migration scenarios supported--so it is not just R-4--but it is the specific maintenance level on R-4 that works with the specific maintenance levels of R-5, and Rnext. We have more of those permutations and combinations supported in this roll-out, which, I think, will be of great assistance to our customers. That will allow them to migrate in a way that's more natural, as opposed to having forced options or limited options.

Tech Update: Any thoughts on Pocket PC?

Zollar: Indeed--we have a client for Pocket PC. We've announced it. It's called Mobile Notes. The platforms that we support in the mobile and wireless space--which we think is critical for client access capability into the Domino infrastructure--are Pocket PC and Palm. We don't build the code directly, but we work very closely with Research in Motion on the BlackBerry device. We also support the Epoch environments, so that gives us support for Nokia and Ericsson devices. We announced support for Nokia's 9210 communicator a few months back. So, when you step back and look at the devices we support--they represent 90 percent of the handheld devices. That's our strategy. And, of course, we work with the network operators so that we have support through the wireless networks.

Tech Update: In sizing up Lotus vs. Microsoft, it's really difficult to find market share numbers that Microsoft and Lotus won't dispute. But, what's your official position on number of seats today?

Zollar: We go by what IDC reports. IDC has reported us as holding--in their July 2001 report--the number-one position--with 39 percent share of seats, and 50 percent of the revenue share. We're pleased with that. We also have our own internal numbers, but we don't play the game of releasing our total numbers any more. This is because we've moved on to focusing more on our customers' priorities--total cost of ownership, return on investment--and demonstrating value with things like our Knowledge Discovery Servers, which is an exciting new product line for us that can really help with that information overload problem. It brings the power of the Google search algorithms to the enterprise--with enterprise searching capabilities that not only apply to documents, but also to people's expertise. This notion of locating experts is an important part. We connect that into the SameTime instant messaging technology, and now you have the ability to search for, and immediately connect to the best expert in your organization on any given topic.

Tech Update: Back to the numbers game. If I took the worst numbers that I could find for Microsoft's share and the best ones that I could find for Lotus, skewing this as best as I possibly could into Lotus' direction--the growth trend still favors Microsoft. Can that trend be reversed? And, if so, what role will Rnext play in that?

Zollar: You have to look at where we have our share advantage. Our share advantage over Microsoft tends to get larger in two major dimensions: First, in organizations over 5,000 employees and second, outside of the United States. Now, the first is actually quite logical because we have always differentiated our messaging offering with collaboration features. The bigger organizations get, the more they value collaboration. It's why companies like Exxon-Mobil, after a shoot-out, picked Notes and Dominoe as a standard--throwing out their Exchange environment. Outside the United States, we have also just been really effective in executing. Microsoft did not execute as well in the early days outside the United States as they are now. That gave us an advantage. We've taken large share positions in places like China and Europe and Japan. So I think that those are the two key factors.

I think, in general, the small-to-medium businesses have been in an area where Microsoft has had strength across their product line. We focused on enterprises that have dimensions of complexity. So, if you've got a lot of organizations (in terms of business units, five thousand or more people), and geographic distribution, [your issues revolve] around communications and collaboration and getting people to work together. We put far more features into our product to address that market set than Microsoft has. A great example of that are some of the fine-grained security controls that we've got--things like execution control lists, in addition to access control lists. The idea is being able to deal with executable code and knowing where that executable code comes from as a way to help keep viruses and other invasions out. These are the kinds of things that have been a part of our differentiation. And, it is part of what we feature with our customer set.

Tech Update: Speaking of viruses and worms and all of that...as an ex-Lotus Notes user, one of the things that I enjoyed was that 99 percent of these things that came into my system couldn't affect it, because the code couldn't run in the Notes environment, like it can in the Outlook environment. Could somebody who wanted to target Notes actually be successful? In the wake of all the security problems, how much have you prioritized that type of security?

Zollar: Good question. We have put priority on building features like the execution control-list feature into our product set. Look, I would never say that hackers can't attack any environment that they're determined to attack. There are certainly a lot of people trying to do a lot of malicious things out there. But, I think, it is true that if you talk to our customers, they do want the different experience. Maybe some of it is targeting, but there's certainly a part of it that represents the feature set that's in the product.

See: Zollar unplugged: Part 2