Collaboration and Content Strategies Blog

Elliott/Novell: What Might Happen to GroupWise?

Blogger: Bill Pray

The bid by Elliott for Novell has lead to speculation on what may happen should the buyout be successful. Blogs from Drue Reeves (Novell Going Private?) and Richard Jones (Elliott/Novell: Implications on SUSE) have highlighted their observations. Having been a former Novell employee and product manager for GroupWise, I want to take the opportunity to add my observations on what might happen to Novell’s communications and collaboration technologies should the buyout occur.

GroupWise has been a solid, mature, feature rich, enterprise solution for many years. However, over the past few years GroupWise has seen a decline in market share. GroupWise has trailed the leading vendors (IBM and Microsoft) in development of functionality. Novell has increasingly relied on partnerships to provide new functionality such as mobile access, business application integration, and team workspaces (eventually acquiring the technology). Given Novell’s investment in and the current state of GroupWise, it is likely that it would be sold off to a partner.  GWAVA or Messaging Architects are the leading candidates. These partners have the capability to take the technology and run with it as a vertically focused alternative to the bigger vendors.

Novell also has the Teaming solution (technology acquired through the acquisition of Sitescape) and the recently announced Pulse that might of interest to a variety of vendors.

Adobe is one of those vendors. Adobe continues to push into the collaboration market and might be interested in Novell’s communication and collaboration technologies and the loyal customer base. Adobe has a solid web conferencing solution and is diving into the software-as-a-service productivity suite market, but does not have e-mail yet. GroupWise has had success in the state/local government and health care verticals – which are also strong verticals for Adobe.

Novell’s solutions are weak in their support for the SaaS delivery model (except maybe Pulse when it is available), but Rackspace might also be interested in expanding their solution set with Novell’s collaboration technologies and taking them to a SaaS or managed service delivery model.

In sum, despite being viewed as an “also ran” in the communications and collaboration market by some, I believe Elliott is correct in its bet that there is significant value in the various Novell technologies and they will be of interest to several other vendors.

What VMware Needs to Do with Zimbra to Win in the Enterprise

Blogger: Bill Pray

VMware completed the acquisition of Zimbra this week. In order for Zimbra to find success in what is shaping up to be a very competitive e-mail market - with Microsoft continuing to dominate market share, IBM holding on to a significant number of seats, and Cisco and Google trying to disrupt through new delivery models and technologies – I believe VMware needs to address five strategic issues:

1. SaaS Strategy: Zimbra’s SaaS strategy to date has been to be an arms supplier to providers who offer the Zimbra technologies to clients as a hosted service. Short term, sticking with this strategy will probably net additional partners as disaffected partners from IBM and Microsoft look for options while the two dominant e-mail vendors build out their SaaS e-mail offerings. Long term, those partners will have a difficult time competing on price as Cisco, Google, IBM, and Microsoft achieve economies of scale that allow them to drop the price on their SaaS e-mail offerings. So, long term, VMWare needs to define a SaaS strategy that either selects a very large partner in the hosted space that can compete or enter the hosted market directly and compete.

2. Open Source: VMware needs to leverage the open source community and capabilities of Zimbra and invest in growing them. The open source underpinnings to Zimbra are a source of its strength as a technology. The Zimbra web client and Zimlets are good examples of the benefit of open source for Zimbra.

3. Outlook Support: Long term, the Zimbra web client needs to be the strategic direction for client access for Zimbra. Short term, VMware needs to make the Outlook connector using the native MAPI protocol rock solid in order to deal with users’ desire to use a familiar client. It needs to work well. To date, no Microsoft competitor has been very successful in supporting Outlook as a client for a non-Exchange server backend despite Microsoft publishing the the Outlook-Exchange Transport Protocol, although several have tried.

4. Unified Communications: Zimbra currently does not have a unified communications story. Integration and/or the addition of real-time synchronous communication and collaboration is required to compete in the enterprise market.

5. Virtualization Support: VMware can make Zimbra “the best” e-mail server running in a virtualized environment by optimizing support for production e-mail server implementation on their hypervisor technologies. This will also help VMware keep a step ahead of other virtualization vendors by enhancing VMware’s support of a highly transactional application like e-mail. So, even if VMware does not win the e-mail business from an enterprise, they can still be the vendor of choice for the hypervisor for on-premise e-mail production servers.

E-mail Retention: An Enterprise Necessity

Blogger: Bill Pray

Vendors did not initially design e-mail systems with records management in mind. Specifically, they did not optimize e-mail formats and clients to support the storage and protection of e-mail content in a manner consistent with corporate records management policies. Consequently, regulatory compliance and legal requirements are forcing organizations to implement e-mail retention solutions that easily retrieve and control e-mail content. An effective e-mail retention solution offers numerous benefits to organizations: improved messaging system performance, secured and compliant correspondence, legal readiness, enhanced message value, and increased worker productivity.

E-mail retention should be a priority for all organizations. E-mail retention mitigates costs when responding to lawsuits or audits and improves productivity by making e-mail records findable and usable. Effective e-mail retention combines message management, message storage, and records management. Organizations need to consider e-mail retention part of their enterprise content management (ECM) strategy. In particular, they must treat e-mail as they would any other content type. In order to achieve success, organizations need to choose and implement an e-mail retention solution based on clearly defined policies and goals.

An e-mail retention system is a crucial element of an organization’s enterprise content management (ECM) strategy for two primary reasons: first, to mitigate costs of addressing legal discovery and audits; second, to improve productivity by making e-mail content easily findable and usable. Organizations should choose and implement their e-mail retention solution based on clearly defined policies and goals. This will help organizations select the right vendor(s) and solution for their needs in a vendor landscape that is dynamic.

Burton Group customers can read more in-depth analysis in the recently updated and published document “E-Mail Retention: Getting Value Out of the Mailbox.”

Lotusphere 2010: Rebuilding Domino for LotusLive

Blogger: Bill Pray

During the opening keynote of Lotusphere 2010 Kevin Cavanaugh, Vice President of Messaging & Collaboration Software, announced that LotusLIve Notes is “making major changes.” IBM will begin offering full Notes and Domino as secure, multi-tenant services. What this means is that IBM is rebuilding Domino.

Rebuilding Domino for LotusLive is the next step for IBM and not unexpected. The current offering is a dedicated service, requiring the minimum purchase of 1,000 users. Domino has a decade plus of design and development as an on-premise solution, but the new market opportunity is SaaS e-mail. In order for IBM to compete, it has to rebuild Domino to be multi-tenant capable because winning in the SaaS e-mail market is going to require that IBM reach economies of scale to compete at the price points that other vendors are hitting with their offerings and still be profitable.

Some of the enhancements that IBM talked about during one of the sessions are:

• Simpler administration through a web browser instead of the administration client – One the most significant areas that can reduce overhead for e-mail systems is making management easier. This also sets IBM up to potentially create role-based administration and extend those capabilities from LotusLive Notes to customers.
• Local replica moving to local cache – This enhancements improves the client / server communications through reducing traffic. IBM is also adding a traffic control throttle on the server side. This will help LotusLive Notes maintain performance.
• Improvements to failover and failback – High availability is a must for SaaS e-mail. Going down in the SaaS world attracts a lot of unwanted attention, as Google as learned.
• SAML-based single signon for both services and on-premises – Enhances the hybrid model of working with on-premise and SaaS solutions. The users signs on once and everything works, no matter where it is delivered from.
• Storage improvements – Driving the costs of storage down through optimization helps IBM to cut its costs for LotusLive and compete.
• Automated user provisioning – A must for SaaS services to keep IBM’s costs down for LotusLive. Automating the provisioning process makes life much easier for the LotusLive admins.
• Automatic server repair – Again, lessening the work of the admins and increasing resiliency lowers costs for LotusLive.

What is not clear is how these enhancements will be packaged for the on-premises software. IBM did not clarify if this will be a separate version of Domino that runs only in LotusLive or if these enhancements will also be delivered in the next version of Domino. I would expect IBM to roll them into the next version of Domino also.

Beta will be coming in a few months, according to IBM. Once IBM has this initial rebuild of Domino in place, they will lower the minimum to 50 users, modify the pricing, allow up to 5Gb mailboxes, and provide up to 1 Gb file storage in LotusLive Notes. Sametime IM will also remain as a feature of the solution. IBM will then be in a better position to pitch LotusLive Notes for power and knowledge workers and LotusLive iNotes for task workers.

This rebuild is not unlike what Microsoft has done with Exchange 2010 in order to make it SaaS e-mail friendly. It is part of a race by the major vendors to take their on-premise solutions, optimize them for SaaS, and realize economies of scale, before vendors like Google (who built e-mail as a SaaS solution from the start) can deliver a good enough SaaS e-mail solution for the enterprise at a lower price point.

Lotusphere 2010: Does Lotus Know?

Blogger: Bill Pray

The theme for IBM Lotusphere 2010: Lotus Knows.

The lead speech in the opening keynote by William Shatner was entertaining.

It has been an interesting year for the IBM Lotus folks – the market has become more crowded with new and significant competitors (often, who are also partners – e.g. Cisco, VMWare) entering the communications, collaboration, and content technologies market via acquisitions and the software-as-a-service (SaaS) delivery model. IBM has responded, albeit the market perception is that they have been a bit slow in their response.

A few observations from today’s opening keynote:

• The keynote to Lotusphere led off with the IBM’s assertion that since the release of Lotus 8.0 in August 2007, IBM has garnered 18,378 new customers. It is not clear how this translates to market share. Burton Group does not perform specific market share research, but other research firms have been quoted as saying that Lotus Notes market share has declined over the past two years, especially in the North American market. However, Panasonic’s debut as a new reference account for LotusLive.com heralds IBM’s viability as an enterprise SaaS communications and collaboration vendor. 
• There is a new general manager for Lotus – Alistair Rennie. I overheard a comment from someone in the crowd that the GM position for Lotus seems to be a revolving chair.
• Much of the keynote was, to quote a colleague, “underwhelming.” The direction and efforts announced are expected, given current market conditions and enterprise requirements. For example, demonstrations of the ongoing development of mobility and Lotus showcased features needed for Lotus to remain relevant in the current market when compared with competitors. The good news is that IBM is doing what it needs to do to keep up with market requirements, however, nothing jumped out as extremely innovative. 
• A promising “Lotus Knows” message was that IBM clearly understands that the hybrid environment for the delivery of communications, collaboration, and content (3Cs) is the new model for enterprise’s leveraging the SaaS delivery model and requires work by IBM to better enable the interoperation between the services in the cloud and those that remain on-premises.
• SaaS delivery of the 3Cs by IBM is clearly strategic to IBM now. Much of the effort throughout the next year will be centered around enabling and enhancing IBM’s SaaS 3C offerings.
• In the reference account / customer presentation from Sylvia Steinmann from Zurich Insurance Company, Ms. Steinmann articulated the question that I often hear asked by enterprise customers: “Should we stick with Notes?” The answer for Zurich Insurance Company was to stay with Notes and upgrade to 8.5.1 because they “could not make the business case to move 60,000 employees” to another solution. This is precisely how enterprises should answer that question - through a strategic business case.
• Kirk Gutmann from General Motors arrived in style for his reference account / customer presentation in a brand new yellow Corvette convertible. One of the more interesting statements he made was “virtualization of the backroom is essential – a mandate for GM” in reference to cutting costs and creating more efficiency for the 3C infrastructure.
• Project Vulcan is IBM’s answer to Google Wave for the IBM customer. I am not sure about the name – it makes me think geek instead of collaborative. However, conceptually, (like Google Wave, Novell’s Pulse, and Cisco’s Inbox-Centric Collaboration) project Vulcan shows real promise for evolving the inbox into a virtual work environment that intelligently aggregates the information needed with the tools to communicate and collaborate.

“Transitioning” to Exchange 2010 Telebriefing

Blogger: Bill Pray

Come listen and ask questions a the next CCS Telebriefing tomorrow and Wednesday:

Another Burton Group TeleBriefing

Service: Collaboration and Content

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Topic: “Transitioning” to Exchange 2010: Is It Worth the Effort?

Presented by: Bill Pray

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A challenge for Microsoft with the Exchange 2010 release is to convince customers that it does something new enough to “transition.” Moving to Exchange 2010 is not an in-place upgrade. It is a transition — making the move more expensive and complex for the enterprise. Microsoft also focused much of the development of Exchange 2010 to rebuild it for software-as-a-service Exchange Online offerings. Therefore, what does Exchange 2010 offer to the enterprise that justifies the transition? In this TeleBriefing, Analyst Bill Pray reviews Exchange 2010 and provides insight into the business case for and against upgrading to Exchange 2010.

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Dates:

Tuesday, January 12, 2010

2:00 p.m ET/ 11:00 a.m PT/ 19:00 UTC GMT /20:00 CET

Wednesday, January 13, 2010

9:00 a.m. ET/6:00 a.m. PT/14:00 UTC GMT/15:00 CET

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Potential Zimbra Sale to VMware

Blogger: Bill Pray

Earlier this week, Kara Swisher from All Things Digital broke the news that VMware may buy Zimbra from Yahoo! (Exclusive: VMware Likely to Buy Zimbra From Yahoo). I blogged my thoughts on possible buyers for Zimbra from the communications and collaboration market last September when rumors started circulating that Yahoo! was shopping Zimbra. VMware was not on the list.

It would be an interesting move by VMware to move up the stack. There are some synergies that might be beneficial to VMware. For example, if you ask enterprise IT admins who have virtualized Exchange what hypervisor technology they used, the answer will be almost always be VMware. And Zimbra is touted as an Exchange server replacement.

So, VMware’s pitch might be: “Hey, you are already using us to virtualize your e-mail servers to gain a better ROI for your messaging environment, how about replacing that e-mail server with a less expensive alternative that will work even better with our virtualization technology? Oh, by the way, your users won’t notice a thing because our e-mail server works just like the one your replacing.”

However, what about software-as-a-service e-mail? The anticipated direction that most thought Yahoo! would take Zimbra was to turn it into an enterprise-class SaaS e-mail / collaboration offering that leveraged Yahoo!’s substantial infrastructure assets. While VMware certainly could also take Zimbra this direction (and would have to given the steam that is building behind enterprise-class SaaS e-mail), it might already be too late. Cisco, Google, IBM, and Microsoft are well down the path to building out the infrastructure and services to economies of scale that deliver lower price points and profitability. In fact, the price war is in full swing, as evidenced by last fall's activities from IBM’s price for LotusLive iNotes, to Cisco's price for WebEx Mail, and Microsoft’s lowering of BPOS prices. VMware would have to play catch-up in a market that is moving fast – a potentially expensive bet that might not pay off given the caliber of the competition.

The other option is that VMware can continue to white-label Zimbra, as Yahoo! is doing, to third-party hosting providers. While this will continue to work for awhile, the price war will eventually make it very difficult for any third-party hosting provider to compete in a market that Cisco, Google, IBM, and Microsoft are carving up with their economies of scale.

For an on-premise e-mail server play, a Zimbra acquisition by VMware has some interesting possibilities. But for enterprise SaaS e-mail, VMware might be too late to the game.

Hosted Collaboration Services and the Fourth Amendment – Supreme Court to Hear Case

Blogger: Bill Pray

In July 2008, I wrote a blog entitled Hosted Collaboration Services and the Fourth Amendment. That blog centered on a court decision in the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in the case of Quon vs. Arch Wireless. The New York Times reported yesterday, in the article Supreme Court Takes Texting Case, that the Supreme Court has agreed to hear the case. As I mentioned in my first blog, even though this particular case is about text messaging, it is likely that it sets a precedent that can be applied to e-mail and other forms of hosted collaboration. This is summarized well at the end of story as Adam Liptak quotes Judge Stephen G. Larson regarding this case:

“Though the legal issue in the case, City of Ontario v. Quon, No. 08-1332, concerns only text messaging in government workplaces, the Supreme Court’s decision may provide hints about its attitude toward privacy in the Internet era more generally.

The larger question, Judge Stephen G. Larson of the Federal District Court in Riverside, Calif., wrote in declining to dismiss Sergeant Quon’s case before trial, is this: ‘What are the legal boundaries of an employee’s privacy in this interconnected, electronic-communication age, one in which thoughts and ideas that would have been spoken personally and privately in ages past are now instantly text-messaged to friend and family via hand-held, computer-assisted electronic devices?’” (Supreme Court Takes Texting Case; December 14, 2009; New York Times)

The Evolution of the Inbox

Blogger: Bill Pray

Much has been said about how approaches like Google Wave may spell the final doom of e-mail. An article in the Wall Street Journal recently declared ”Email has had a good run as king of communications. But its reign is over.”

The reality is that e-mail is a very useful tool, particularly when used as designed - for asynchronous communication. Just like snail mail continues to meet the needs of specific uses cases, e-mail will continue to be a key part of the information worker’s toolkit for many years into the future.

What is changing is the e-mail centric inbox. Cisco, with its recent launch of Cisco WebEx Mail, calls its vision “Inbox-Centric Collaboration.” The idea is to enhance the inbox and create a place where Cisco says “multiple tools and data sources come together.” Essentially, this is what IBM and Microsoft have been attempting to do for years with desktop e-mail clients, but haven’t been entirely successful. The dynamic that has changed is the fit client – a rich web client - that permits the aggregation, management, and use of information from multiple sources (including e-mail) more easily than the fat desktop clients.

While Cisco is approaching the universal inbox from the e-mail inbox direction, Novell is coming at it from the team workspace with its recently announced Pulse offering. Novell’s Pulse attempts to create a place where e-mail, real-time collaboration (i.e. instant messaging, messaging services, presence), co-browsing, and content co-editing and sharing all come together in a managed environment – Novell refers to it as a “unified inbox.”

 
Screen shot Novell Pulse

The evolution of the e-mail client to a richer, managed inbox experience where e-mail becomes just one of the communication tools – an asynchronous communication tool – assures a continued long life for e-mail technologies.

The Value of Exchange 2010

Blogger: Bill Pray

Listen to a short podcast with with Michael Atalla, Group Product Manager for Microsoft Exchange and Steve Schafer, Director of Global Information Systems for Global Crossing (an Exchange 2010 customer) about the value of upgrading to Exchange 2010.

I asked them two questions:

In the current economic climate, enterprises are navigating a new normal with tight controls on costs. Upgrading or changing the e-mail infrastructure can be costly and time consuming for the enterprise. Name the top three reasons you give to an enterprise wanting to realize hard ROI - quantifiable returns - on upgrading to Exchange 2010.

Exchange 2010 is not an in-place upgrade, it is a transition – meaning the customer has to stand-up a 2010 server and then migrate from older to versions of Exchange to 2010. Exchange 2007 was the same. Migrations can be complex, time consuming, and expensive for a large enterprise. Why isn’t Exchange 2010 an upgrade and how does Microsoft help customers with the migration?

Due to technical difficulties (that never happens!), the podcast is not yet available for download, but can be replayed. I will update this post when it does become available. In the meantime, you can listen to the podcast here. (Note: the Intercall page requires you enter a name and e-mail address for the replay - you may enter any name and e-mail address you choose).