SOA

Purple is the new Yellow?

It wasn't that long ago - 2 years to be exact - that we all were steaming with positive energy.

Lotusphere 2006 had just finished, and there was no longer any doubt: Notes was cool! This was "our time". The Notes 8 client - back then known just as "Hannover" - was about to revolutionize the collaboration universe with it's Eclipse based Managed Client Framework. IBM Lotus was back on the up (although they were never REALLY down), and a catchy slogan spread like a stampede through the blogosphere ...




Yeah - Notes was cool, and IBM Lotus was really aiming for the top. After a couple of years of wavering strategies and dubious products (yes, that would be the Lotus IBM Workplace brand I'm talking about there), IBM Lotus was back on track with the powerful collaboration platform at the front of their strategic roadmap, supported strongly by the SameTime 7.5 enterprise IM platform and a few remnants of Lotus Workplace, the Websphere Portal based collaboration initiative. Notes 7 was running on a stick, connecting travelling Nomads from just about any place in the world, and the future would bring back the Macintosh client and also support Linux as the desktop OS. Last but not least, the future was going to dispose of traditional folder-structure-based work habits and turn us into super-productive activity-centric collaborators.





Lotusphere 2007 came and went with more positive news.

"Hannover" turned officially into Notes & Domino 8, and the client platform now included a suite of Open Source based productivity tools, clearly targeting the average users of Microsofts rather proprietary Office Suite. SameTime was joined as a supporting act by the Web 2.0 evolution of teamspace suite Quickplace - now apparently even Quickr.
The fun didn't stop there. In 2007, IBM announced an agressive first strike on what was to become the Enterprise 2.0 market by launching their brand new Social Software Suite, "Lotus Connections", allowing the business world to take advantage of the combined wisdom of the fabled "One Million Monkees". Connections had also incorporated the stray "activities server" promised in 2006.

It was a bold move. I'm certain that I heard jaws drop anywhere from Redwood to Redmond, and maybe even in some places around the Googleverse as well.

IBM was taking a lead in the market. It had jumped ahead of the companies that were lazily looking at the anarchistic antics of the crowds on the web, not suspecting that these viral tendencies was so close to the enterprise strategies on the tabletops of Fortune 500 CEOs.





So - here we are. It's the end of january once again. Lotusphere 2008 is over. We should be on our toes, reaching for the highest levels of knowledge sharing, skill tapping and collaborative innovation. IBM Lotus have launched the products announced last year as they promised, and new products have been announced:

Lotus Foundations - an all-in-one, entry level,  5 to 500 user, Domino Collaboration server, including firewall and backup technologies, as well as productivity tools.
Lotus Symphony - the above mentioned productivity tools implemented as a seperate suite outside the managed client framework.
Lotus Protector - a "black box" anti-virus / anti-spam solution for Domino.
Notes 8.5 public beta for Mac.
Notes client coming for Ubuntu Linux.
Lotus Mashups.
And Lotus Connections 2.0.

Once again - an awesome series of products, and a very agressive strategy.





Well ... it might just be me, and it might be nagging over small, pathetic details, but ...

The things that really MOVE the collaboration platform forward, aren't really part of the Lotus portfolio, are they?

Activities, Connections, Mashups ... They're not running on the Lotus Domino application platform. They're running on the Enterprise Java based Websphere  platform. Even Quickr - formerly Domino-based Quickplace - is now available as a Websphere based implementation, and the "Advanced" part of SameTime, now ONLY runs on Websphere!

So what? You say!

Well ... to some, perhaps not a lot. To many others, it's a disaster. All over the world, companies spend fortunes reducing the complexity of their infrastructures, trying to centralize of fewer, broader platforms. In the Enterprise Java space, several players are on the market; Sun, BEA (now to be Oracle) and of course IBM.

That, of course is not a problem, since the Enterprise Java platforms standardize using Java Specification Requests (JSRs) - two such important ones being the portlet specification standards, JSR168 and JSR 286.





Wrong!

In situations like these, the vendors design their platform products to be compliant, so that any portlet written to JSR168 or JSR286 will run on the platform.
Sadly, the applications the vendors themselves design for these platforms, do not comply, and as such can't run on platforms from other vendors.

So all those companies out there, who have large, well-established Domino infrastructures, but have chosen alternatives to Websphere in the Enterprise Java market, are in trouble. They can't deploy all these new and awesome Web 2.0 collaboration products, without compromizing their consolidation strategies and adding more platforms to their infrastructure.

Talk about increased TCO, right there!

Like I said, I'm probably just being a bitter old man, here. But my reality is, that I'll have a hell of a hard time trying to convince my management, that this implementation is actually worth the investment. I will likely be facing argumentation like "you want us to sacrifice our strategy for a corporate Facebook?", or - even worse - "If we have to migrate, we might as well migrate to [insert your favourite evil conglomerate here]".

And should I succeed, I will have bought into a new and effective vendor-lock-in. If the ideas take off, more and more Websphere servers will spawn.

The last - and only - justification of this strategy would be, if the Domino server, within a few years, like the Notes client has become a plug-in to the Enterprise Java framework, would migrate to the Websphere platform, as "Lotus Collaboration Server for Websphere".

Wait ... wasn't that what Lotus Workplace was going to be?

Websphere, indeed ...






Does that mean, that Notes is dead?




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 Breaking News  Notes Domino  3 Comments January 30th, 2008