Pattern Finder

IBM's LotusLive: Clean Branding, Messy Backend

After a year, IBM finally decided to fix its Bluehouse fiasco. At Lotusphere 2008, IBM announced a SaaS-based sharing service for documents, contacts, activities, and meetings. However, it (1) didn't include e-mail and (2) was reserved for companies of fewer than 500 employees. Given that implementations of SaaS-based solutions in the market (e.g., Google Apps) always begin with e-mail, and that large enterprises (IBM's bread and butter) were looking for SaaS solutions as a way to save money, at announcement this was a really broken product. We told IBM that--they did the, "Yeah, right" thing--and we started referring to it internally as Outhouse.

Fast forward a year. At Lotusphere 2009, IBM announced that they were adding e-mail to the solution, giving it a new name (LotusLive), and making LotusLive available to companies no matter what their size. Much better, but still behind the market curve (which I'll get to). The part I found interesting was that IBM Lotus at a press/analyst briefing admitted that although the analysts had universally panned the lack of e-mail in January 2008, it was only when early customers also expressed their displeasure that IBM finally decided to fix the e-mail problem by buying Outblaze, a Hong Kong-based e-mail provider in January 2009.

So compared to last year, Bluehouse (now LotusLive) is a much better product. However, that's faint praise.

Where IBM did make a smart move was on the branding. LotusLive is the umbrella term for IBM's online offerings. This is in stark contrast to Microsoft, which seems to delight in confusing both customers and analysts with a plethora of terms: Office Live Workspace, Office Live Small Business, Windows Live, and the Microsoft Business Productivity Online Standard Suite. (This may be changing, as Microsoft is apparently going to merge the Office Live and Windows Live brands).

LotusLive supports web conferencing, collaboration, and e-mail, but the e-mail offering is balkanized. For lightweight mail, you use the web-based iNotes client (or a POP3/IMAP client) with the Outblaze backend. If you want full-featured mail, you use Lotus Notes Hosted Messaging. In short, there are two different e-mail engines at work here, which does not bode well for large clients that want to switch back and forth between SaaS and internal e-mail. This is a discussion I have with clients all the time, and the ultimate dream is to be able to turn a knob and seamlessly alter where e-mail is hosted. The mailboxes migrate behind the scenes, licensing is taking care of automatically, and the business is able to tune its e-mail engine to map to what the business needs from month to month.

This is the vision that Microsoft is marching toward--how fast that marching will occur is up for debate--but Microsoft understands that software plus services implicitly demands that the two become fully integrated. IBM gets that at a user interface level--"Click to Cloud" is IBM's term for being able to easily store information in the cloud--but hasn't yet declared that it is willing to do the heavy lifting to fully integrate the e-mail backends.

In summary, IBM's SaaS story is much better than it was a year ago, but the story still doesn't have the happy ending that enterprises ultimately want.

Lotus Symphony: Looking to Go Beyond Playing Catch Up

IBM Lotus had several presentations on Lotus Symphony this year. Symphony is an office productivity suite that natively supports ODF-based word processing documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. Other characteristics are:

• Free license
• Supports 28 languages
• Runs on Windows (XP, Vista), Linux (Redhat, Suse, Ubuntu), and Mac OS X
• Based on Lotus Expeditor
• Three support options: Symphony Embedded Version (free: included with the purchase of other products such as Notes 8, Foundations, and iNotes); Standalone Symphony Free Support (free: online support via forums); Symphony Standalone Fee-Based Support (priced for up to 20,000 users, limited to 20 technical contacts)

At the moment, Symphony acts as a wannabe to Microsoft Office, with a few things missing, such as VB Macros (that feature is coming). If Symphony were just that, it wouldn't be that interesting--true, it could save you licensing fees compared to Office, but that would be all it does: it would improve the bottom line but not offer increased productivity for information workers.

However, IBM Lotus is becoming a bit more outspoken about their future plans. On slide 5 of the IBM Lotus Symphony Overview (presentation ID506), the company portrayed a pyramid with five tiers, with an arrow pointing up the pyramid stating, "Over time, investment will shift." From bottom to top the tiers are:

1. Meet needs of most users: Usability, stability, platform support
2. Adoption capability: Interoperability, compatibility, deployability
3. Linked values: Cross integration with Lotus portfolio, first choice for office tools of Lotus users
4. Solution enablement: Programmability for ISVs, extensible and open
5. Beyond Office: Breakthrough document manipulation experience

The interesting one is number five: Beyond Office is the idea that Symphony should become part of an ecosystem that makes composite documents, similar to what the DITA standard allows for technical documentation. And guess what--IBM is the company that pioneered DITA. So given the company's DITA heritage and IBM Lotus' declared strategic plan, over the next several years Symphony should become a much more capable, interesting, and productivity enhancing product.

ECM Process Framework Example: Autonomy Buys Interwoven

This morning Autonomy, a search company, announced it was buying Interwoven, a web content management company. Historically, the market has viewed these two sectors as separate and distinct; they certainly leverage different technologies. However, in my view this is more of a case of, "Why has it taken you so long?"

In the past, the market viewed systems that stored different content types as different silos; hence, we got document management systems, web content management systems, digital asset management systems, etc. However, over the past several years we've seen a movement from "silos to streams"--that is, the silos are toppling, giving way to passing all forms of content through process steps. Put another way, content is moving from being storage-centric to process-centric. In 2006, Burton Group noted this by creating the "ECM Process Framework," illustrated below.

With this acquisition, Autonomy now has product that applies to the first five process steps: creation, storage, distribution, discovery, and archiving, putting it in the same feature league as large vendors such as IBM and Microsoft.

This acquisition puts pressure on Vignette, Interwoven's competitor, and sets the stage for increased integration among the process steps.

Lotusphere 2009: What Might Have Been

Following are two blog posts I had mentally (and optimistically) written before attending Lotusphere 2009. Unfortunately, IBM Lotus didn't make the corresponding announcements. Oh, well. But since it seems a shame to waste them, here's a glimpse of blog posts I would have loved to have made:

• IBM Lotus Combines Quickr and Connections to Create a SharePoint Killer: When a prospect asks IBM Lotus about collaboration these days, Lotus ticks off the triad of Notes, Quickr (collaboration workspace and document libraries), and Connections (social software). Lotus customers have heard the pitch for several years and get it; everyone else gets confused and goes with Microsoft's simpler (IBM would claim simplistic) pitch of SharePoint. Finally recognizing that its complex messaging was getting in the way, IBM Lotus announced today that it was combining Quickr and Connections to create QuickConnections, a software suite that gives SharePoint 2007 a run for its money.
• IBM Lotus Announces "Social for SharePoint": IBM Lotus has historically preached to the choir: making major announcements at Lotusphere to the Lotus faithful. While IBM Lotus has a huge installed base, this habit has the effect of making enterprises who aren't Lotus customers unsure of what the company offers. Furthermore, many enterprises now view collaboration through a SharePoint lens--and if a vendor doesn't play in or complement the SharePoint ecosystem, it's not worth taking the time to figure out what they do offer. Finally recognizing that ignoring the SharePoint elephant in the room is not getting them new customers, IBM Lotus has announced a compelling add-on to SharePoint: Social for SharePoint, which is basically a Connections add-on to SharePoint. Although customers like SharePoint's portal and content management capabilities, many feel that its social software capabilities are rudimentary--and they are. Social for SharePoint fixes that problem in spades, and leverages the enhancements to Connections that IBM continues to make. In short, IBM Lotus now offers a product that works with SharePoint to deliver the social software capabilities that Microsoft promises but doesn't deliver. 

Off to Lotusphere

I'm off to Lotusphere in Orlando this morning. The gotcha of travel today is all the prelim time. I got up at 5:00 AM so that my wife could drive me to the airport by 6:30, so I could get there by 7:30 for a 9:30 AM flight.

I'm giving a presentation late Monday afternoon entitled, "The Future of Collaboration." Otherwise, I'll just be attending the conference, listening to the keynotes and being shuttled here and there to analyst briefings.

In my view, Lotusphere 2008 wasn't very impressive; I'm hoping that this year's will be better. In 2008, Lotus announced some useful features for the installed base, it talked a lot about futures, but it didn't offer anything groundbreaking that would put Microsoft's SharePoint juggernaut on the defensive. Accordingly, our resulting Burton Group report was entitled, "IBM Lotus 2008: An In-Between Year." It will be interesting to see if this year is more of the some or whether IBM has something up its sleeve that will rock the collaboration, communication, and content world.  

Google Expands GAPE Sales Footprint with Resellers

Today Google announced that it was allowing resellers to sell Google Apps Premier Edition (GAPE). Google is going to sell it to them at a 20% discount ($40/year per user), and then when they sell it to organizations at a markup they can keep the profit.

Here's some media coverage of the announcement:

• Information Week: "Google Woos Allies With Apps Reseller Program"
• PC World: "Google Launches Reseller Program for Apps Premier"
• eWeek.com: "Google Fires Up SAAS Reseller Program for GAPE"

This is a good move on Google's part, in that it increases the sales feet on the street and blunts the issue of arrogant Google salespeople (a complaint I hear time and time again from enterprises who have purchased the Google Search Appliance or are talking with Google about buying Google Apps).

However, in my opinion this does not mean that Google's sales to enterprises will turn around any time soon. (Google is doing very well selling to SMB's, but not to large enterprises). This move is like a car manufacturer announcing they have an expanded network of dealers. Umm, OK, but does anyone want to buy the cars? And at the moment the answer is no.

Large enterprises assume that:

• A document sharing system can be used with a highly secure records management system that will execute hold orders
• A document sharing system can read the Office 2007 file formats (now out for two years)
• A system supporting large numbers of users will have administration that is role-based, where users can be assigned a role and thereby inherit the necessary security settings
• An e-mail system uses e-mail distribution lists that can be embedded within other distribution lists
• Mission-critical systems have telephone support lines with knowledgeable humans at the other end 24/7
• Mission-critical systems have been generally released, and are not in beta status

Google does not yet offer any of these capabilities for GAPE, despite being told by enterprises for almost two years that they need them (GAPE was announced in February 2007). Instead, Google has put its development prowess behind "ooh, aah" features such as video sharing, rather than the bread and butter capabilities that enterprises require.

In short, Google's announcement is a step in the right direction, but it's one step in a 1,000 mile journey.