Purple is the new Yellow?
It wasn't that long ago - 2 years to be exact - that we all were steaming with positive energy.
Lotusphere 2006 had just finished, and there was no longer any doubt: Notes was cool! This was "our time". The Notes 8 client - back then known just as "Hannover" - was about to revolutionize the collaboration universe with it's Eclipse
based Managed Client Framework. IBM Lotus was back on the up (although
they were never REALLY down), and a catchy slogan spread like a
stampede through the blogosphere ...
Yeah - Notes was cool, and IBM Lotus was really aiming for the top.
After a couple of years of wavering strategies and dubious products
(yes, that would be the Lotus IBM Workplace
brand I'm talking about there), IBM Lotus was back on track with the
powerful collaboration platform at the front of their strategic
roadmap, supported strongly by the SameTime 7.5 enterprise IM platform
and a few remnants of Lotus Workplace, the Websphere Portal based
collaboration initiative. Notes 7 was running on a stick, connecting
travelling Nomads from just about any place in the world, and
the future would bring back the Macintosh client and also support Linux
as the desktop OS. Last but not least, the future was going to dispose
of traditional folder-structure-based work habits and turn us into
super-productive activity-centric collaborators.
Notes was indeed NOT dead!
Lotusphere 2007 came and went with more positive news.
"Hannover" turned officially into Notes & Domino 8, and the client platform now included a suite of Open Source based productivity tools,
clearly targeting the average users of Microsofts rather proprietary
Office Suite. SameTime was joined as a supporting act by the Web 2.0 evolution of teamspace suite Quickplace - now apparently even Quickr.
The fun didn't stop there. In 2007, IBM announced an agressive first strike on what was to become the Enterprise 2.0
market by launching their brand new Social Software Suite, "Lotus
Connections", allowing the business world to take advantage of the
combined wisdom of the fabled "One Million Monkees". Connections had also incorporated the stray "activities server" promised in 2006.
It was a bold move. I'm certain that I heard jaws drop anywhere from Redwood to Redmond, and maybe even in some places around the Googleverse as well.
IBM was taking a lead in the market. It had jumped ahead of the
companies that were lazily looking at the anarchistic antics of the
crowds on the web, not suspecting that these viral tendencies was so
close to the enterprise strategies on the tabletops of Fortune 500
CEOs.
It was a massive push!
So - here we are. It's the end of january once again. Lotusphere 2008
is over. We should be on our toes, reaching for the highest levels of
knowledge sharing, skill tapping and collaborative innovation. IBM
Lotus have launched the products announced last year as they promised,
and new products have been announced:
Lotus Foundations - an
all-in-one, entry level, 5 to 500 user, Domino Collaboration server,
including firewall and backup technologies, as well as productivity
tools.
Lotus Symphony - the above mentioned productivity tools implemented as a seperate suite outside the managed client framework.
Lotus Protector - a "black box" anti-virus / anti-spam solution for Domino.
Notes 8.5 public beta for Mac.
Notes client coming for Ubuntu Linux.
Lotus Mashups.
And Lotus Connections 2.0.
Once again - an awesome series of products, and a very agressive strategy.
So why aren't I thrilled?
Well ... it might just be me, and it might be nagging over small, pathetic details, but ...
The things that really MOVE the collaboration platform forward, aren't really part of the Lotus portfolio, are they?
Activities, Connections, Mashups ... They're not running on the Lotus
Domino application platform. They're running on the Enterprise Java
based Websphere platform. Even Quickr - formerly Domino-based
Quickplace - is now available as a Websphere based implementation, and
the "Advanced" part of SameTime, now ONLY runs on Websphere!
So what? You say!
Well ... to some, perhaps not a lot. To many others, it's a disaster.
All over the world, companies spend fortunes reducing the complexity of
their infrastructures, trying to centralize of fewer, broader
platforms. In the Enterprise Java space, several players are on the
market; Sun, BEA (now to be Oracle) and of course IBM.
That, of course is not a problem, since the Enterprise Java platforms standardize using Java Specification Requests (JSRs) - two such important ones being the portlet specification standards, JSR168 and JSR 286.
Brilliant, right?!
Wrong!
In situations like these, the vendors design their platform products to
be compliant, so that any portlet written to JSR168 or JSR286 will run
on the platform.
Sadly, the applications the vendors themselves design for these platforms, do not comply, and as such can't run on platforms from other vendors.
So all those companies out there, who have large, well-established
Domino infrastructures, but have chosen alternatives to Websphere in
the Enterprise Java market, are in trouble. They can't deploy all these
new and awesome Web 2.0 collaboration products, without compromizing
their consolidation strategies and adding more platforms to their infrastructure.
Talk about increased TCO, right there!
Like I said, I'm probably just being a bitter old man, here. But my
reality is, that I'll have a hell of a hard time trying to convince my
management, that this implementation is actually worth the investment.
I will likely be facing argumentation like "you want us to sacrifice
our strategy for a corporate Facebook?", or - even worse - "If we have
to migrate, we might as well migrate to [insert your favourite evil conglomerate here]".
And should I succeed, I will have bought into a new and effective
vendor-lock-in. If the ideas take off, more and more Websphere servers
will spawn.
The last - and only - justification of this
strategy would be, if the Domino server, within a few years, like the
Notes client has become a plug-in to the Enterprise Java framework,
would migrate to the Websphere platform, as "Lotus Collaboration Server
for Websphere".
Wait ... wasn't that what Lotus Workplace was going to be?
Websphere, indeed ...
Does that mean, that Notes is dead?
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Purple is the new Yellow?
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1 Scott Hooks Permalink Amen Lars, Amen. I asked a question in the Ask the Developers session at Lotusphere about whether these products would ever be made to run on Domino, and was deferred to who *I think* was the CTO of Lotus software, who gave a direct "No" response. I knew the answer before I asked the question - I just asked it so that the Lotus leaders in the room could hear the applause at the question and the disappointment in the answer hoping that it would potentially influence their thinking. IMO, the answer doesn't reflect that Notes/Domino is "dead", it just means that it isn't their platform for their new enterprise products. It will be interesting to see if that changes if adoption is low or if they decide they want to better penetrate the existing Domino install base.
2 Lars Olufsen Permalink Yeah, Scott. I heard your question, and it was almost as if you spoke for me.
I agree, that Notes isn't dead, but I think the concept of the
Domino server platform might well be something we need to
rethink.
The client has been ported to Eclipse and handles native J2EE apps
as well as Notes databases. The same client framework is available
"sans" Notes as Expeditor, and also supports Symphony.
Domino Designer is moving towards the Rational Application
Developer - and maybe even the Jazz Software delivery
platform.
The Domino Directory is moving towards alternative solutions like
LDAP or perhaps even a native Active Directory.
The notes storage format can be replaced by DB2.
Lotus Forms handle basic information entry on the Websphere
platform.
Lotus Workplace Web Content Management can handle
presentation.
Connections & Mashups are pure Websphere.
SameTime is moving towards Websphere - so far with the new,
advanced, tools.
Quickr runs on both platforms, but as the "social" platform
evolves, won't the Websphere version be easier to integrate with
the other tools?
See a pattern?
Plug in the IBM SOA strategy; Process modelling tools, Integration
hubs (ESBs), Business Intelligence tools etc ...
What are the odds, that the current Domino server functionality
will soon be ported to Websphere?
The functionality might live on, but the Notes/Domino brand sure as
hell is under pressure!
Notice though, that I'm not necessarily saying that this is bad
from a functionality point of view. But marketing-wise, especially
internally in companies like the one I work for, this is really,
REALLY difficult to work with!