Ed Brill, head of Lotus' Marketplace Strategy team
"Lotus has had approximately a hundred major winbacks from Exchange already this year, and with the Domino R5.05 release that number is expected to increase."
Ed Brill, head of Lotus' Marketplace Strategy team
"Lotus is focused on evolving the collaborative application market in a way that's meaningful for customers."
Brill |  | Touted as a "foundation for new avenues of collaboration" by Microsoft, Exchange 2000 really just provides functionality that has been central to Lotus' offering for over a decade -- and not as well or as reliably. How can a major software provider be so far behind?
At the recent Microsoft Exchange and Collaboration Solutions Convention in Dallas, TX, a Microsoft product manager stood up in front of a room full of people to demonstrate something new: with Exchange 2000, users can respond to a meeting invitation with a counter-proposal for the time or place. Lotus technology has been enabling users to schedule meetings this way since 1993.
How can a major software company be so far behind in the collaborative application market?
Ed Brill is the head of Lotus' Marketplace Strategy team. He says the gap between Lotus and Microsoft originates with Microsoft's broad focus. "Lotus is all about collaboration and has been all about collaboration for the 11 years that Notes and Domino have been in the market," Brill said. "Microsoft is about everything from email to flight simulation. Collaboration is just a speck on their overall balance sheet. It's not their core competency. They've tried for 6 years to enter this space, and they have not gotten there."
Essentially, having tried and failed on their own, Microsoft is now re-working Exchange to follow Domino's lead: Microsoft is including the functionality where it can that Lotus has made standard, and advertising it loudly. Where it can't catch up to Domino, Microsoft makes "vaporware" claims to functionality that Lotus has already made a reality.
Lotus Soars Ahead with Raven
Does Microsoft have what it takes to imitate Lotus? Next year, Lotus will complete its "Raven" release, a robust Knowledge Management (KM) platform, the first half of which will ship before the end of 2000. "Raven" will provide a single portal that will allow end users to find information and applications; make the user aware of other knowledgeable people in the company; and organize all related tasks, teams and projects.
Can Microsoft provide this kind of functionality? Although they have made claims as to some of it, no concrete plans or proposals are yet visible. For example, Microsoft has generated some hype about a forthcoming KM product, code-named "Tahoe." However, no one seems to know exactly what "Tahoe" is going to be or how it will be used. Microsoft has alternately marketed "Tahoe" as a content indexing application, a search engine, a portal and a document management solution. In fact, what "Tahoe" actually is sometimes seems to depend on whom you speak to at Microsoft.
According to Brill, Microsoft's strategy is to "tell the market, 'We're going to have all that stuff that Lotus has got too, now. Wait for us and we'll have it right away.'" Imitation being the sincerest form of flattery, Brill responds courteously to this message: "Welcome to the market, Microsoft. What took you so long?" he said.
Lotus Bluejay: Integration, not Competition
Lotus' response to Exchange 2000 is less about direct competition than it is about integration. "Lotus is focused on evolving the collaborative application market in a way that's meaningful for customers," Brill said.
Lotus has shipped a set of features in Domino R5.05 that were codenamed "Bluejay." The goal of "Bluejay" is to make Domino servers compatible with all Microsoft products -- such that a company can leverage all the powerful Domino functionality, while allowing its users to remain on their MS Office and Outlook environment.
According to Brill, the capability to seamlessly integrate with Microsoft's messaging front-end will be a key growth factor for Lotus. Companies that have already made their messaging decisions face more hurdles in switching, he said. "Bluejay" enables them to simply add the Domino server and get collaborative functionality that extends further than Exchange, and an infrastructure that is more reliable and more scalable than Exchange.
So far, that strategy has been successful. Brill says, "Lotus has had approximately a hundred major winbacks from Exchange already this year, and with the Domino R5.05 release that number is expected to increase."
Domino still provides the best infrastructure
At first glance, two lists of the respective features in the Domino and Exchange servers would look similar. It's at the level of how the technologies are deployed -- the true value of the infrastructure -- where the Domino server's superiority starts to become obvious.
Take server reliability for example -- a top priority for enterprise customers in selecting an IT infrastructure. Both the Domino and Exchange servers have clustering capability. That means if a server goes down, another server comes online to pick up its load, automatically. This functionality is key to providing server reliability.
Although Microsoft will say that the Exchange server provides clustering capability, it actually provides only 2-way clustering -- one fallback per server. Furthermore, clustered Exchange servers are connected via a single disk drive. That single connection is a single point of failure, where the whole point of clustering is to avoid a single point of failure.
Domino, on the other hand, provides up to 6-way clustering. That means six servers, all linked together and backing each other up -- true clustering protection that does not depend anywhere on any single point that could fail, and can even span multiple operating systems. For enterprise-level customers that are serious about reliability and availability, Domino is the right choice.
Conclusion: Microsoft has some catching up to do
The software giant seems to have planned to wade into the collaborative applications market and dominate. Microsoft has puffed up its first real attempt at collaborative technology with vaporware and loud advertising claims of "innovative" capabilities that are already standard in Lotus' offering. Lotus has been providing businesses with real solutions in the collaborative market for nearly a decade. If Microsoft wants to compete, it will have to knuckle down and play follow-the-leader. |