Lotus's Irish unit takes lead role in new products

Dublin facility is at heart of IBM's big plans for its subsidiary Lotus and its Workplace suite of collaboration software, writes John Collins.

At its annual Lotusphere user conference in Florida last week, IBM subsidiary Lotus was busy reeling off a list of industry heavyweights that it is partnering on technology projects with.

Everyone from consumer giants like AOL and Yahoo to enterprise leaders like SAP and Blackberry manufacturer Research In Motion was name-checked at the event, which drew 6,000 Lotus users and developers to Orlando.

But there's one major technology name that you won't hear mentioned in friendly terms at a Lotus event and that's Microsoft.

Both Lotus and the wider technology landscape have changed massively since Lotus was founded in the mid-1980s, but one thing has pretty much stayed constant - its rivalry with Microsoft.

The Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet application for PCs put the company on the map in the 1980s and wiped the floor with Microsoft's competing Multiplan offering, the predecessor of Excel.

In fact, before Microsoft came to own the market for personal productivity applications in the 1990s with Office, it looked as if Lotus's SmartSuite might give the Redmond giant a run for its money.

Now the lines of the battlefield have been drawn up around collaboration, with Microsoft's mail server product Exchange facing off against Lotus's combination of the Domino server and Lotus Notes client.

In the week running up to the Lotusphere event, Microsoft got a pre-emptive strike in with the announcement of a special program to lure users of Domino and Notes clients to Microsoft Exchange.

That certainly didn't take any of the wind out of the sails of Lotus executives, who were extremely upbeat at the event - even by the standards of the technology industry.

Mike Rhodin, general manager of IBM's Workplace, portal and collaboration software business - effectively the top executive in the Lotus division - was particularly positive at a press conference to expand on the details of the new products and other announcements revealed on the first day of Lotusphere.

"We have been the leaders in collaboration for the past 15 years and we have no intention of backing down from the position," said Rhodin.

He also claimed that revenue from the Lotus-branded products - since the 1995 acquisition of Lotus by IBM, the company name has effectively become a product brand - had grown 10 per cent year on year.

According to a July 2005 report from the Radicati Group, Microsoft had approximately 32 per cent of the market for e-mail and collaboration software, and IBM had 24 per cent.

But in true IBM style, Rhodin was not going to be drawn into a public spat with Microsoft.

"Winning is not about fighting with Microsoft but rather helping our customers get real value which is an IBM value," he said.

Rhodin's avoidance of a spat with Microsoft is not just good IBM manners. In many ways, IBM does not want to get into an Exchange versus Notes/Domino argument because e-mail, calendaring and task management is just a portion of what the Lotus software is capable of.

It has long positioned Lotus Notes - a favourite of large enterprises and government departments - as a groupware product that enables users to work closely together using a variety of tools, rather than a mere e-mail client.

In contrast, Microsoft has only more recently started to gain traction with its Sharepoint portal product and other technologies that work with Exchange.

One of the areas of collaborative technology that Lotus has been strong in since the late-1990s is instant messaging. Its SameTime client is popular in corporate environments because it offers the control and monitoring facilities required by IT managers and external regulators in industries such as financial services.

IBM announced that later this year SameTime will be able to interoperate with popular consumer instant messaging clients including Yahoo Messenger, Google Talk and AOL's instant messaging products.

One of the major announcements was that IBM's Workplace will have enhanced support for open standards and will effectively become the front end for IBM's service-oriented architecture.

Workplace is IBM's suite of collaboration software and development tools that enables organisations to easily create their own applications based around collaborative tools such as e-mail, calendaring and intranets.

As a result of these changes, it will be much easier for non-technical users to create applications for internal use.

This ability is underpinned by a new component architecture that IBM is using to develop the products - Rhodin said this means that customers can re-use their investments across different product lines. It also means that his division can pull in components from different parts of IBM, which means that it has the resources of 20,000 engineers to draw on.

IBM also announced that Hannover, the next release of Notes, and a major upgrade to Domino will be available next year, but assured customers they would have a smooth upgrade path. In the meantime, it also announced enhanced integration with SAP applications, support for the Macintosh platform and mobile capabilities for Nokia and Blackberry devices amongst others.

Just as Lotus is hardly recognisable from the top-selling spreadsheet vendor of the 1980s, so too are the company's Irish operations.

In 1985, Lotus was one of the earliest foreign software companies to establish a base here when it opened a European distribution centre in north Dublin.

Initially, that facility was distinctly low-tech - it basically copied floppy discs and boxed them up with manuals for distribution to customers in Europe.

Now the Lotus division is the IBM Workplace development lab for Europe, which has a remit to support European customers in particular, but also business partners and smaller software companies developing for IBM collaboration platforms, according to Elaine Stephen, a director of IBM's Dublin Software Labs.

The Dublin lab, which subsumed the Lotus development operation post-takeover, has a leading role on a number of the IBM/Lotus products. The Dublin operation provides testing facilities for European customers, where it emulates complex environments to replicate how software might perform in actual usage.

It also develops a number of tools that enable customers to roll out their own Workplace applications.

The area where it does most cutting-edge research though is on the learning features of IBM Workplace. While traditional e-learning has focused on providing online courseware, Stephen says that the company is focusing on how to capture all the unstructured knowledge that is contained in e-mails, instant messaging and other communications and to serve it back up to other employees at the relevant time.

Clearly, IBM has big plans for Lotus and Workplace that seem to dovetail well with the way more and more businesses are working in fluid teams dispersed in different locations.

If only their main competitor in the space wasn't the equally well-resourced Microsoft, success would seem assured.