Collaboration and Content Strategies Blog

Oracle Enters Beehive in Collaboration Tournament

Blogger: Craig Roth

Oracle announced its release of Beehive 1.5 today.  They are hoping that a technology refresh of the Beehive collaboration assets (along with additional assets acquired along with BEA) can give Oracle another shot at the collaboration market after the moribund Oracle Collaboration Server has fizzled. 

The announcement comes at a good quiet spot between IBM's collaboration announcements at Lotusphere in January and Microsoft's announcements on SharePoint 2010 that will probably come to a peak at their conference in October. Likewise, its most attractive feature is that its platform and standards offer an alternative to a Microsoft stack (Windows Server, SQL Server, SharePoint) and an IBM stack (Notes/Domino and/or Quickr+Connections with WebSphere).  Beehive offers more standards than you can shake a stick at (although I don't recommend shaking sticks at beehives generally): WebDAV, IMAP/SMTP, JSR 170 for content repository access, XMPP for IM and presence, LDAP or AD for directory, and JMX for management.  You can use Solaris, Windows Server, or Linux for the serve and any development tool desired.  From a technology point of view its appeal is likely to be based on architectural decisions about what standards and stack an organization wants to embrace (or stay away from).

But technology aside, the key for Oracle (as always) is whether they can utilize their channel to sell this stuff and whether organizations can be persuaded to pay real money for it after previous false starts.  In the past, Oracle hasn't had much voice left to talk about collaboration and portal after yelling about database and ERP.  But since the Stellent acquisition, content management has been a bright spot for them and I think it has changed some minds. 

Personally, I want to see the collaboration market stay competitive.  End users win when vendors compete hard on features, quality, and pricing.  Lately it seems like Microsoft SharePoint has gotten a lion's share of attention from organizations.  Microsoft has been the main attraction at this tournament  and I'm glad to see Oracle showing up to play.  IBM Lotus still feels to me like they haven't shown up to the tournament and are setting up a parallel exhibition match for the same sport in another part of town.  They didn't mention SharePoint by name in the Lotusphere main tent (although it was clear who they were talking about and Jive got a mention). But as an analyst I'm like an unaligned spectator at a sporting event - you just want to see a diverse set of skillful challengers compete really well and bring up the level of play.

The Role of Communication, Collaboration, and Content Technology Investments during Tight Economic Conditions (part 3)

Blogger: Craig Roth

This is the third in a series on how organizations can frame and deal with the issue of constrained budgets due to the recession at the same time users are demanding productivity-enhancing technology for communication, collaboration, and content. 

In part 1 I set up the idea that companies that do best coming out of a recession are those that invest prudently while they are in one.  In part 2 I mentioned three approaches for meeting user needs with no ability to increase budgets: cost savings, cost avoidance, and "free" stuff.

In this part I will discuss the fourth approach which I'll call "leveraging existing investments" or "doing more with what you have".  I've given this approach an entry of its own because I think it's the most useful - but overlooked - of the four approaches.

Doing More With What You Have

Communication, collaboration, and content management technologies have been around a long time - long enough for large organizations to have accumulated quite a portfolio of them. Many are going unused or underutilized.  An initial attempt at rolling them out may have been ill-planned, badly timed, or poorly messaged.  Or the champions or experts on that technology may have left the group, leaving no one to push them forward.  Now is the time to dust off these valuable assets and take a fresh look at how they could meet current user needs.

Not all existing assets can be scaled up without incurring substantial expense.  If new versions haven't been licensed, playing catchup to get current may be expensive.  In other cases the product cost is mostly based on per-seat licensing, in which case scaling up the existing investment may still be cost prohibitive since costs will rise in near-linear fashion with users.  This applies to some high-end document management and web content management systems for example.  But other products, such as portals, are licensed on a per-CPU or per-server basis, which can allow for some economies of scale when upsizing the usage.  Portals are a good example since initial purchase and setup was often funded during better economic times but they may be underutilized today.  This is a good time to do a portal refresh and beef up parts that are working, fix or ditch parts that aren't, find out information sources that aren't on the portal but should be, and re-launch a freshened portal.

The best opportunity for leveraging existing investments is to utilize communication, collaboration, and content technology built into superplatforms that hasn't been used.  SAP shops have access to a full suite of portal, content management, and collaboration technology in NetWeaver.  IBM Lotus Notes shops may be focusing on email and ignoring its collaborative capabilities.  Organizations with Windows Server have access to Windows SharePoint Services (the no cost part of the SharePoint portfolio).  Oracle's application server still includes Oracle Portal.  Microsoft OCS 2007 includes instant messaging built in.  There are many examples where useful technology has been bundled in with something the enterprise is already using. 

It is still important to do due diligence in order to avoid winding up with a lot of technologies that were just installed because they were already paid for, but aren't right for the organization.  But if the option is to wait until the recession is over to get painfully needed communication, collaboration, or content technology, leveraging existing investments should get some very close scrutiny.

What I Am Looking for Out of Lotusphere 2009

Blogger: Craig Roth

While I'm freezing here in Chicago and looking at the pictures of arriving conference goers in shorts squinting in the sun, my significantly warmer CCS teammates Guy Creese and Bill Pray are in Orlando at Lotusphere 2009.  They will be writing blog posts from Orlando as events occur, but here's an opening set of thoughts from me about what I am looking for out of the Lotusphere 2009 announcements and what comes out of the sessions (and Guy and Bill's meetings with IBM execs).

• The overall question every year for me is whether Lotus can gain upward momentum in our target market - large organizations in developed countries
• Is there a 3+ yr strategy or vision apparent in the messages? Or is it, like previous years, a big, long, unprioritized list of features, branding, and acquisitions.  To simplify a message you have to know your audience, so this is a proxy for asking whether Lotus has identified its target market for new client acquisition and a clear strategy to attack it
• In talking with the rest of the CCS team about the upcoming Lotusphere, we bounced around the idea that maybe Lotusphere isn't the right place to make strategic IBM Lotus announcements. Kinda ironic given the title of the conference, but it really is meant for the Lotus faithful, and particularly the techies (admins, developers) among them. It's all just preaching to the converted. Maybe that's why the MacWorld announcement got so much attention - to gain marketshare they have to convey a message to those not among the faithful, and those people won't be at Lotusphere.
• Will Bluehouse finally include email, the first priority for SMBs wanting SaaS communication and collaboration?
• What are the new growth figures for Notes/Domino and its new cousins Quickr/Connections?
• What's new with the SaaS strategy?
• What is the SharePoint compete strategy?  What is the SharePoint coexistence strategy?  SharePoint has been growing like a weed on their home turf and to this point we've heard no marketplace messaging on how to compete with it or live with it.  To date the answers out of IBM have been conversationally pointing out where IBM is better (e.g., social software, UC) or why Microsoft sucks.  But a verbal script plus labeling your competitor's customers as morons doesn't equal a strategy.
• How has the messaging for portal evolved as portals are subsumed into the superplatform and mashups are sprouting up everywhere?

This promises to be a make-or-break Lotusphere and I'm interested to hear what comes out of Orlando. 

Lotusphere 2008 - Innovation Lab

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 and some of the non-session activities.

Below is a quick report of what I saw at the Innovation Lab at Lotusphere.  Three of my interests were represented there: virtual worlds, portals, and globalization. 

Bluegrass

• There were actually four virtual world projects, the best of which was Bluegrass, which was neat because it shows how virtual worlds can be used as a visualization mechanism for existing data
• Architecture: It runs on Torque rather than Second Life, a good choice for business applications and one I expect to see more of to get away from the quirks of Second Life.  Torque does the visual rendering and has client and server components.  The client is C++ with a JNI layer that does the bridging between the Torque client and the interface.
• Content: It renders information on development projects from Rational Jazz such as teams, actions taken on components, and repositories.  Jazz uses a standard textual IDE to allow access to this information.  But Bluegrass acts as an alternate view (I won't say UI since it isn't meant to replace Jazz's UI) to enable better discovery of information, socialization, and brainstorming.  Each team is represented as a tree.  People are shown as, well, people.  When people take an action it shows as a bubble floating up over their heads, like a tweet.  One can look around a busy team and see little bubbles (emitters) floating up, kind of like smoke signals.  Where there's smoke, there's fire in that project! Actions taken in Jazz have instant effect in the virtual world and vice versa.
• Social aspects: You can enter a brainstorming house where sticky notes can be picked up and moved.  This part was ok, but not as cool to me as the rendering of real information in an alternate view.
• Usage: Alas, there isn't a great success story on usage yet.  But it is being picked up by a few teams at IBM and hopefully they can show some sort of improvement or ideas that only came about because of Bluegrass

Contextual Portal

• This project demonstrated usage of pattern recognition to guide the user to pages they might be interested in but not know about, much in the way Amazon makes recommendations. 
• It can recommend portlets, people, and pages based on what others in your same role did
• There is a "contextual search" part that results in a custom portal page with the portlets related to that search, such as maybe entering a company name and getting a legal news portlet, financial information portlet, and ERP system data all with info on that company

Real-Time Translation Service

• I thought the coolest thing I saw in the Lab was the Real-Time Translation Service.  There were a number of demonstrations of IBM's various forays into translation
• One was an IM plugin.  While there are other examples in the industry of 2-way translation to allow IM users speaking different languages to converse, I liked that this one had a dropdown to select the domain of conversation (like helpdesk versus programming), which really helps a translation engine's accuracy
• The speech to speech translation was very good.  Well, I guess I can't judge how good considering I don't speak Arabic, but from the textual translation on the screen it seemed to be picking up the spoken English very well.  He spoke English into the microphone and a few seconds later smooth-sounding Arabic came out the speaker
• The translation tool was like the speech to speech translation, but supported speakers on both ends and a persistent chat window between them.  The demonstration showed speaking in English to someone in Japanese and getting responses back, with the chat window keeping a record of the conversation
• He also showed a shipping product, GALE, that does rapid translation of video feeds.  For example, you can watch Al Arabiya and English subtitles appear at the bottom.  It is useful even for English since the text is stored with the image and can then be searched to, for example, help a PR agency find every mention of a product on talk shows

What I'm Looking For From Lotusphere

Blogger: Craig Roth

Well, I'm packing my bags for sunny (I hope) Orlando to attend Lotusphere.  IBM puts on a very good, well organized event so I'm looking forward to going.  I also look forward to seeing my teammates, new and old.  Everyone from the Collaboration and Content Strategies service will be there.  When you work on a distributed team it means a lot when you get the chance to hang out in person.

The team came away from Lotusphere pretty jazzed last year (I wasn't able to go to the main event, but caught up with one of the "Lotusphere Comes to You" events).  But during the year the good set of products didn't seem to get the energy we thought they would, at least from our clients.  I don't know too much about the email side of things, although Ed Brill says they made some minor gains even though pundits were expecting losses. On the collaboration side, which I follow more closely, I didn't notice any compete strategy against Microsoft SharePoint even though there are parts of the Lotus portfolio that could compete quite well.

My teammates have posted up some summaries of what they are looking for from Lotusphere (see  Karen Hobert and Mike Gotta). 

I'm just looking for 2 things:

1. Does IBM have an aggressive compete strategy against Microsoft SharePoint for Quickr and Connections?  I'm sold on the products having some great features and addressing a pain point in organizations.  But without a good compete strategy - particularly for non-Lotus shops - I can see success in some measures (adoption into the existing client base, a handful of competitive wins in non-Lotus shops, and absolute dollars/seats), but failure in terms of turning the ship around (getting on the path of consistent, long-term Lotus marketshare growth) and halting the momentum of Microsoft in the collaboration space.
2. How is WebSphere Portal adapting to the morphing of the portal market into composite applications?  This isn't really a WebSphere conference so I don't expect to get a lot on their portal here, but there are some presentations on it that I expect to see.

I look forward to seeing you there.  And make sure to see Karen and Mike's presentation!

Comments on "The Real Outlook Competitor - Forward Thinking by Michael J. Miller"

Blogger: Peter O'Kelly

(Also posted on my personal blog; I'm still working on the blog post triage criteria...)

The Real Outlook Competitor - Forward Thinking by Michael J. Miller

(Via Ed Brill)

Lots of people are talking about what new competitors to Microsoft's Outlook e-mail programs, from desktop applications like Thunderbird to web-based programs like Zimbra or Google Mail. But in fact, there's only one program that really comes close to challenging Outlook today.

That program is Lotus Notes.

See the article (or the many comments in Ed's blog post referencing the article) for more details/discussion/debate...

I think there's more to the story, however: if you consider the Eclipse.org-based foundation in Notes 8, along with the OpenOffice.org-derived Lotus Symphony "productivity editors", the fact that Notes 8 runs on multiple platforms (eventually multiple versions of Windows, Linux, and Mac OS), and the fact that Notes is also a template-driven application development platform (with a tightly-coupled and purpose-built, multi-platform server counterpart), the competitive overlap goes far beyond Outlook. You could argue that aspects of Notes actually compete with Windows, Office (not just Outlook), and even the .NET Framework.

It's also true that Notes is the leading competitor to Outlook, of course, and Outlook's role has expanded quite a bit in Office 2007 -- e.g., for forms-based applications, serving as the primary off-line-able Microsoft solution for SharePoint document libraries and discussions, as Microsoft's primary XML syndication client, and more.

So in many respects it's business as usual, with IBM Lotus and Microsoft competing for the privilege of being the application where information workers spend most of their time each day. Both IBM and Microsoft are hedging their bets, e.g., with IBM promoting Quickr and Connections, especially to customers/prospects who (for whatever reason) don't want Notes, and Microsoft also emphasizing Groove and browser-based SharePoint capabilities, but at the end of the day most information workers close either Notes or Outlook before they head home (often only to re-open the applications after dinner...).

Domino or Sharepoint?

A recent post in the CIO Advice forum asked the following:

I find myself with a tough decision to make. Do I take my group forward utilizing Domino or SharePoint? I have the infrastructure for both. Any ideas? I would love feed back from anyone who is using either. Thanks in advance!

Below is my reply:

To reiterate what previous commentators have pointed out, it's very hard to make a blanket statement as to which is better. Part of the problem is that Domino and SharePoint are two different animals with many similar spots.

It's often hard to do a point by point comparison of the two. This reflects the different approaches to the market that IBM Lotus and Microsoft are taking. Both vendors are making platform plays for the communication, collaboration, and content management (3Cs) market, they are just going about it differently. The 3Cs market has converged from separate application silos to platform infrastructure with integrated services, resulting in looser coupling of clients from platform services and more contextual interfaces. This convergence of technologies is opening up new opportunities for customers as well as vendors to take part in a market that was once dominated by IBM Lotus. Not only has Microsoft delivered on their collaboration promise with SharePoint 2007 products and technologies, other detractors (e.g., Oracle and Adobe) as well as open source (e.g., Zimbra, SiteScape) and consumer vendors such as Google, Yahoo!, and Cicso/WebEx, are making entries into the market with strong offerings. These new market realities are a bonus for customers who can take leverage the competitive market to their advantage.

So the real issue boils down to, as my predecessors have pointed out, making an informed decision. Good news is that there is a lot of information to be found in a competitive market. There's also a lot of opportunity to try things out before you buy. New delivery models in the SaaS market are proving to be very attractive to many customers who are concerned with support, cost, and consolidation issues.

Getting back to IBM vs Microsoft, as I mentioned both vendors are making a platform play, it just depends on how deeply embedded you want to get with the technologies. As I pointed out, the two vendors are taking different approaches to the market:

IBM Lotus is taking a top-down approach refocusing on existing products and technologies (Notes/Domino, Sametime, and WebSphere Portal), offering Unified Communications and Collaboration (UC2) through a common extensible client, and introducing two new Web 2.0-standards based solutions for team-based (Quickr) and social software (Lotus Connections) in the business. IBM Lotus has taken some daring steps with its new product announcements which, if they can deliver a compelling value proposition, will likely bring new customers to IBM Lotus. This product-centric approach is focused on providing solutions that can support different systems (e.g., Windows, Linux, Mac) and interfaces (e.g., desktop, browser, mobile) with mix-and-match capabilities. Even IBM Lotus' development model is focused on composite applications over platform specific applications. There is some overlap in the feature sets of some of the products, which IBM will need to figure out how to clarify, however with standards-based interfaces offers multiple options for customers.

Microsoft's is taking a bottom up approach where 3Cs services are provided on a single platform architecture built around Microsoft technologies, specifically Windows Server, SQLServer, Exchange Server, Office Communications Server (which is due to ship later this year) and Office 2007. All technologies support a common programming framework, .NET Framework, for application customization and integration. The Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 is essentially a Windows 2003 server with Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) that have been extended to provide portal, search, business intelligence, and content management capabilities. Its a holistic approach, where organizations that deploy all of these technologies will get the most benefit. Its also a commitment to Microsoft technologies - from the browser to the desktop and mobile device - in order to get the most fidelity and bang for your buck.

2007 is a pivotal year for both IBM Lotus and Microsoft with new offerings across the board for 3Cs. I'd say Microsoft is executing well with their strategy, go-to-market with both on-premises and SaaS offerings, and has made a very compelling value proposition. IBM Lotus still has a lot of ground to cover and catch up after its devastating Workplace product walkabout from 2000 to 2005. Right now, IBM Lotus has been focused on its install-base rather than taking on new blood. Still the new products - Quickr and Lotus Connections - could be IBM Lotus' lucky charm, but that all depends on how successful IBM Lotus is at bringing the products to market in the coming months.

It's never been a better time for the 3Cs market and the question is very timely. All enterprises with existing 3Cs solutions or those with interest in 3Cs should be asking the same questions. Given the nature of the go-to-market approach for both vendors, the decision boils down to a platform decision, and those decisions cannot be made in a vacuum. Organizations must plan ahead and deploy according to their business requirements. They should avoid using a technology (e.g., wiki, blog, workspaces) for the sake of the technology. Rather, enterprises need to examine their business requirements and apply the technology that will serve those processes the best. Customers may find that some technologies they thought they needed just aren't necessary, now or ever. Knowing these answers will help enterprises to decide which product, vendor, or solution will be best for their organization.

posted by Karen Hobert