Lotusphere 2008 - Impressions From a Portal Guy

Blogger: Craig Roth

I'm back from Lotusphere and Orlando now and playing reggae to try to trick my brain into forgetting it's -1 degrees here in Chicago.  It's not working.  I posted a set of blow-by-blow notes from the sessions I attended in my personal KnowledgeForward blog (see Day 1, Day 2, and Day 3) but thought I'd post a summary of my impressions here.  My impressions are also based on some good closed door sessions with a number of IBM executives including Larry Bowden and Mike Rhodin.  That picture was then filtered through my portal-tinted lens to result in my view of where I see IBM doing well and neutral (there weren't any big failures in my view) based on the announcements at Lotusphere 2008.

 

I blogged before Lotusphere that I was looking for 2 things.  So how did they do on those?

1. Does IBM have an aggressive compete strategy against Microsoft SharePoint for Quickr and Connections? 

Answer: no.  They have very competitive products, especially in social software (where Microsoft is hobbled without Knowledge Network) and unified communications (where they beat Microsoft to the punch by over a year).  But there isn't an actual compete strategy on collaboration and portal.  I would consider a compete strategy to consist of technology (discovery and migration tools), sales programs (sales training with well-defined messages and materials, competitive package pricing, compensation incentives), and marketing programs (direct messaging to CIOs and architects).  I think SharePoint has huge momentum at the moment and IBM has the capability to compete if it wanted to.  The impression I got from IBM was that while nothing can be ruled out in the future, right now the most winnable areas are in social software and UC.  I agree, but I would like to see Microsoft get more of a fight as I think this kind of competition would benefit users of IBM and Microsoft collaboration products.  But, would IBM have a very good chance of winning the kind of battle I'm proposing at this time?  It's a gamble and the better odds of a payoff are with social software and UC.

 

2. How is WebSphere Portal adapting to the morphing of the portal market into composite applications? 

I like what is being done with WPS to adapt it more to a composite applications mindset and enhance its purpose-built functionality through the accelerators (7 or 8 accelerators depending on how you count them).  I was a bit surprised that the mashup tool was given different branding though, being "Lotus Mashups" rather than "WebSphere Mashups".  After talking to Rob Will about the architecture I am convinced that, given the addition of widget consumption to WPS, it's a smooth architectural fit even though the products are under different branding. 

Here are some other points I came away with:

• Despite the attempts to make big splashy announcements, I still feel this was more of an incremental year.  Last year, with Quickr and Connections, was a quantum leap. 
• There is solid movement into areas the market is looking for, such as mashups, SaaS, and appliances.  But those last two are more of an immediate play to business partners than end users, so there's one level of indirection to resolve before the success of those programs can be judged. 
• The Atlantic project is a good step towards SAP integration that may even nudge out what Microsoft can do with SharePoint since much of Duet is about integration with Office productivity tools and only a little bit is about SharePoint portal-like integration.

Comments

[Nick Hortovanyi]

I agree with your statement regarding IBM has the ability to compete if they want to against Microsoft Sharepoint.

What disappoints me, is after investing heavily into WebSphere Portal over the last four to five years, we as an IBM Business Partner, do not have the material and marketing support, to compete effectively against Microsoft Sharepoint. In a lot of cases in the SMB arena they haven't even heard of WebSphere Portal Express. By the time we arrive it is too late, the decision has already been made to go Microsoft Sharepoint because of the perceived ease of integration.

On point 2, Atlantic is interesting but is it targeted more so at existing Lotus Notes shops with SAP? MS Exchange is so embedded in a lot of SAP shops as well. Whats in it for SAP to displace MS for IBM in these accounts?