Lotus looks forward with new agenda 23 March, 2006 By Paul Weinberg

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Contrary to recent speculation the health of Lotus Software has never been stronger, he continued.

"I know where that came from, an area of confusion. Most of that has been cleared up."

Lotus's revenue is up ten per cent following a period of resurgence in the past 12 to 18 months he continued.

"At LotusSphere this year we had 40 per cent more growth from the attendance of partners. There were 1,200 partners on a Sunday for the business development [session]."

Currently, there are "roughly" 2,000 Lotus business partners in North America, stated Rhodin.

IBM has been introducing a number of new products and services that complement Lotus Notes and are available in the channel, including the new Workplace Services Express 2.6.

Rhodin says this trend will culminate in the introduction of the upcoming generation of Lotus Notes, code named Hanover, which is slated to be released in beta this fall and for product introduction next year.

Designed from an open standards perspective, Hanover will contain new programming features to support Eclipse, Java, XML and .Net components, he indicated.

"Our belief is that customers will upgrade to this new release very rapidly, creating opportunity for all of our partners. And the expansion of the programmability will attract legions of new ISVs beyond the traditional Notes partner base."

"We also believe that it creates a compelling value proposition for customers using competitive products to move to Lotus."

But he denies that this is a counter move to Microsoft's offering of free migration tools for users to switch their data from Lotus to Microsoft Outlook.

Rhodin maintains that unlike Outlook which is exclusively an email product Lotus Notes contains both e-mail and collaborative functionality.

"I think we should get off this silly migration argument and get on with something that is interesting for clients, which is how do we help them do their work better."

Much of the negative commentary about Lotus has subsided as end-users and clients gain a better appreciation of the productivity improvement focus of IBM's Workplace and activity centric computing strategy, maintained Rhodin.

"It took a while for people to figure out what we were talking about, whether it made sense or not. [Which is] server delivered information that is role based, dynamically delivered, [in the] context of the business process."

"The new generation of computer systems will be built on open standards. And we are going to deliver information and tools to end users, contextually, based on the role they place in the organization. It is a different model than where everybody gets the same tools on the desktop."

IBM's Workplace strategy is built around correcting the mistaken assumption that organizations can tap all of the knowledge inside their employees' heads, said Rhodin.

"I think some of the base ideas [of knowledge management] are resurfacing under a different light, which is more of this concept of collaborative knowledge. Which is you leave the knowledge where it is, but you build processes, systems and tools that allow you to tap into that knowledge."