But if you have that conversation with Lotus general Manager Al Zollar, especially on the eve of his most important annual event (Lotusphere), he'll quickly redirect you from the numbers and the rhetoric, and point out that there's much more to the Lotus vision than Notes and Domino. Even so, Zollar recognizes that Notes (now the client) and Domino (the server) are the crown jewels, and that it's his job to keep them polished, to keep Lotus' entire portfolio of collaboration tools as many steps ahead of the competition's as possible, and to keep the company squarely focused on several priorities.
One of those priorities is staying focused on Lotus' core market. While Lotus' tools can serve businesses of any size, you can tell from Zollar's top five priorities that the company's tools are focused on the challenges faced by large, distributed enterprises.
For example, Lotus' Discovery Server is a solution that helps users find and make contact with expertise that exists elsewhere in a company. As Zollar spoke fondly about Discovery Server, I thought about my own experiences with organizational knowledge and "go-to" people. When you're new to a company, you're constantly trying to figure out where to go for things, or whom to call. More often than not, you stumble across the "go-to" person--someone who has been at the company for so long that they either know everything or know exactly who to call to get it. Virtualize the go-to person into bits and bytes and make him or her accessible via the company's intranet, and you'll understand what problem Discovery Server attempts to solve. That problem, though, is a large, distributed enterprise problem. It isn't one confronting many small businesses, where everyone knows everyone and you can just yell down the hall.
Training and retraining--sisters to expertise discovery--are other big company problems. Although small and medium businesses face them, too, they can't solve these problems with technology that they own or from which they can expect a return on investment. Big companies can, however, and Lotus attempts to solve this problem with its LearningSpace platform.
The sort of enterprise targeted by Discovery Server and LearningSpace is Lotus' sweet spot, according to Zollar. He's trying to keep Lotus focused on enterprises that have dimensions of complexity. These are organizations where communications and collaboration can easily break down because multiple business units, geographic distribution, and five thousand or more people are typically involved.
This is why the numbers used to compare Microsoft to Lotus can be deceiving. While Lotus is focused on building and delivering solutions into a specific segment of the market, Microsoft has been cleaning up in segments that aren't priorities for Zollar. One of those is the small to medium business market, and the other is the ISP market, where ISPs and other service providers are using Exchange Server on the backend for a public facing (and often free) e-mail service. Overall share isn't nearly as important to Zollar as his share of the enterprise market where organizations must streamline collaboration and knowledge management for thousands of users.
When you talk to Al Zollar, you really do get the sense that he knows what the company's focus and priorities should be. But he'll be the first to tell you that execution is everything. In his office overlooking Boston's Charles River, Zollar's whiteboard is perfectly clean except for the Gandhi quote "You must be the change you want to see in the world." Zollar understands that good ideas are nothing without execution. While Zollar realizes that he must rise above the rhetoric and keep the company focused on delivering value to its intended target, he knows his job is to get the rest of Lotus to follow the example he's setting.
That may be easier said then done. Until a few days after the interview, Lotus was heavily promoting a statement that it outgunned Microsoft in a total cost of ownership study co-sponsored by Lotus and Microsoft. The promotion consisted of a headline on its Web site that read "It's official: Lotus Notes more cost-effective than Microsoft Exchange." Unfortunately, the study that the headline cited actually showed that Microsoft Exchange had a lower TCO than Lotus Notes. As it turns out, Lotus did better than Microsoft on half of the criteria--he half that Lotus' promotional effort focused on--but overall, the two were about even. The headline--which was changed shortly after the interview--was a bit disingenuous and proves that Lotus is still willing to take whatever measures it needs to win the rhetoric war.
As for execution in its solutions, Notes and Domino have features that appeal to enterprises, not the least of which is their availability on more than just the Intel platform. By virtue of their architecture, the products also have a natural resilience to certain e-mail-borne viruses that have plagued Outlook (which is used by virtually all Exchange Server users).
But there's still room for improvement in the Lotus portfolio. For example, in my opinion, e-learning resources are knowledge resources and should therefore be easily integrated into any knowledge management platform--like Discovery Server--that claims to help users locate and gather expertise. At press time, company officials confirmed that LearningSpace cannot be integrated with Discovery Server without customization. Perhaps the two will eventually offer out-of-the-box integration.
In the meantime, Zollar has his vision. According to him, collaboration isn't an application. It's a feature that should be in every application. He thinks Lotus is closer to that vision--especially for enterprise customers--than anybody.
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