I am a developer

By Nick Hortovanyi

I like reading Ed Brill's blog . Why you may ask, do I like reading a senior IBM Lotus executive's blog?

Well, he is a superb writer, participates in the online community that he is a part off and gives some key insights into the inner workings of a large multi-national software brand. In the past, he has also left comments on my blog. This showed to me that elements inside of IBM can be approached if the discussion is framed properly. However Ed, I find stands out in the IBM hierarchy and leverages social media, where others are still passive observers. Its a pity that they don't, as until they do they won't understand the innovation that is in the Lotus brand with products like Lotus Connections and Lotus Sametime. We'll come back to this point as tacit knowledge in ICT is important. It is one of the main reasons I started this blog.

I can get quite vocal on twitter about IBM, if I feel that I've been .. well, I can't write those words here. If the IBM Australia Software Channel management team are unresponsive and not transparent, I'll notch it up a tone or two. I'm now finding people inside IBM Australia, not the management team, are responding, as the comments will appear as a red flag on a report. But that is not the reason I'm writing this blog post.

Ed wrote a post "I've never been a developer" and it hit a note with a number of people from across the globe in the Lotus community, with some 125+ comments. It also had resonance with me because I've experienced, and could associate quite strongly, with a number of the points made.

I did not originally sign up to IBM, for the Lotus brand. My interest was with WebSphere & Java (I was mentoring development teams in its use) and WebSphere Portal. IBM moved the WebSphere Portal product into the Lotus brand a few years back. I had to make a choice did I want to continue to leverage the investments in WebSphere Portal certifications through the Lotus brand or resit other certifications to remain in the WebSphere brand? I was tired of certifications so I moved forward with Lotus.

If we found potential sales opportunities we got some excellent pre-sales support from the IBM Lotus guys which also included WebSphere Portal pre-sales. Unfortunately, we either arrived too late to influence a sale and/or when Lotus was mentioned the customer lost interest. Didn't matter if it was Government, SMB or larger business. I kept thinking what is happening here? These products hold significant market share according to all the research I could find. If I keep at it, the effort should result in sales. During this period I learnt a lot of course about cash flow and demand
generation. I became very adept at running marketing campaigns and the pre-sales process (this could be a blog post in its own right).

The sales did not come. The effort I was spending on IBM certifications, meetings and pre-sales was increasing dramatically but the income sources (non-IBM) were drying up as I was neglecting them as the commitment to IBM software increased. In short, none of the IBM pre-sales material helped me achieve any significant sales in the local Australian markets that I tried - Victoria, South Australia and Western Australia. Additionally there was no appreciation or understanding with my potential customers what an IBM Advanced Partner was and what specialisation in an IBM software brand (eg Lotus, WebSphere and Rational) meant for them. There were a few small wins, including being the second company in the world to sell IBM Workplace Services Express (the product was briefly introduced to supplant WebSphere Portal Express with more collaborative components. Was withdrawn from market due to poor sales).

During this whole period, I was working 60+ hours a week (sales, technical, business development) for what seemed like a very, very long period. I wasn't winning. It also had a bad affect on my health.

Was it me? Was it just the local market? The analysts statistics were saying that WebSphere Portal had continuously for a number of years held the top spot in sales. Why couldn't I compete and win against Microsoft?

I started researching this and the major two items I found were:

1. Customers believed that it was a wiser move to leverage their existing investment in Microsoft; and
   
2. Microsoft realised it was their responsibility to generate demand - that is the channel was a fulfillment mechanism.

I started deeply questioning (some said that I have a very interrogative and probing style) why I had been directed by IBM to performing the activities I did. I quickly came to the realisation that in the IBM Australia Software channel, that outside the technical persons I was engaging with, that there was very limited current understanding of the market and what the customer needs were. I could say a lot more here, but believe it may not be wise to in a public blog (if you want to know, email me directly). The short of it, is that they are mainly vertical experts, that is they understand their area of expertise that they are employed to do (and incentified to perform well) but have no tacit knowledge (which I mentioned before) regarding the actual procurement process the customers had to follow. As well as, no first hand knowledge of how to implement, upgrade or develop new components using the IBM software being sold. Now if I'm wrong with these statements, I'd welcome constructive and evidence (not emotion) based debate on the subject. If I'm wrong, I want to know why?

I've got deep technical skills, and can deploy, administer and develop components. I still cut code and consider this to be an essential skill moving forward and wrote about it in a post here. It gives me that tacit knowledge to understand this technology and how to assist clients with its implementation.

What concerns me is that in IBM, the majority of persons I come across, outside of the technical pre-sales team, have no tacit knowledge regarding implementing IBM software on a customer's project. This may be a cheeky statement to make but it would surprise me if more then 5% of IBM's management could write and deploy a Hello World servlet on a linux based WebSphere Application Server deployment by themselves.

So Ed if you read this, I'd encourage you to become a developer and to participate in actual customer projects and to encourage others in the IBM management to do the same.

If people are looking for a scenario, for a hypothetical SMB customer
(with <10 employees with max 2 internal IT persons), try implementing a records management system from a customers perspective, starting with requirements, moving through vendor selection, implementation and the first upgrade. The SMB customer is more then likely to already have an email system (either Exchange or Google Mail) and is not looking to replace it. I've had this scenario before, with a strong relationship with the customer and the IBM Lotus software group, were unable to provide me with a viable solution and competitive positioning to ensure that I won the deal!

Tags lotus developers brand smb market ibm customer   |  Comments 1

Future of portals

By Nick Hortovanyi

Is the purpose of a portal to just aggregate details about services or to provide a unified experience?

Doing some research today, I came across WebCentral's Application Marketplace. It intrigued me, as it's purpose, seemed to be to only aggregate information about other SAAS Service Providers. That, is that it is only a directory of other services, that you would have to join individually (and be billed separately) with different user experiences. I've written before, about the potential benefits, of software multitenancy to drive operational efficiency.

To me it would seem that an Application Marketplace should have the buying and selling in it?

Thus you can see the fundamental issue that I had with it. In my view, an Application Marketplace, should be a Portal, that acts as a SaaS integration point of multiple service providers, with a unified experience for the people that are going to use it.

Tags marketplace saas aggregation portal   |  Comments 1

Future of portals

By Nick Hortovanyi

Is the purpose of a portal to just aggregate details about
services or to provide a unified experience?

Doing some research
today, I came across WebCentral's

Application Marketplace. It intrigued me, as it's purpose, seemed
to be to only aggregate information about other SAAS Service Providers.
That, is that it is only a directory of other services, that you would
have to join individually (and be billed separately) with different user
experiences. I've written

before, about the potential benefits, of software multitenancy to
drive operational efficiency.

To me it would seem that an
Application Marketplace should have the buying and selling in it?

you can see the fundamental issue that I had with it. In my view, an
Application Marketplace, should be a Portal, that acts as a SaaS
integration point of multiple service providers, with a unified
experience for the people that are going to use it.

Tags aggregation marketplace saas portal   |  Comments 0

Getting closer to Java Portlet Specification V2.0 products

By Nick Hortovanyi

The Portlet 2.0 specification (JSR 286) has been a long time in the making. In my mind, maybe a little too long. However the promise of having an event model for inter portlet communication between different vendor implementations and indeed Portal servers in one or more locations, through WSRP 2.0, is very exciting.  

I found a good article on IBM Developerworks - What's new in the Java Portlet Specification V2.0 (JSR 286) , where "Figure . A sample portal page" is showing events between various types of portlets. Its good to see integration with Google Gadgets, which I noticed originally (blog entry here) could not participate in inter portlet communication.  Now, I've been wondering why IBM has been delaying the release of WebSphere Portal 6.1? So I did a search on google to see if WebSphere Portal 6.1 would support it. Low and behold, there was a forum entry saying that current WebSphere Portal 6.1 Beta does.  Looking between the lines one would assume that just after the Portlet 2.0, specification is released we will see WebSphere Portal 6.1 become GA.

Tags specification wsrp java ibm portlet jsr-286 portal websphere+portal   |  Comments 0

LotuSphere comes to you in Australia

By Nick Hortovanyi

Last week, I disappeared to Melbourne for a few meetings. So I decided to attend the Lotusphere Comes to You in Melbourne event. The main purpose of which was to see what the Lotus attentioned community was like in that city as opposed to Adelaide. In addition I wanted  to see if I could gleam any extra information that I had not picked up from observing the broader online communication from the US based Lotusphere event held earlier in the year.

In terms of numbers, there certainly are a larger number of Lotus business partners and a larger number of people that attended the event, then in comparison to Adelaide from previous years.

The opening speech and presentations were of a good quality and there were a lot of live demonstrations of the products (didn't envy the guys doing it one bit - very nerve wracking, but they did an excellent job). This year it was about building on the existing products introduced last year, such as Lotus Quickr, Lotus Connections, in conjunction with Lotus Notes/Domino (new versions), Lotus Sametime (new versions) and WebSphere Portal (more accelerators). There were two major new products announced  Lotus Mashups, (which was as a consequence of the work done by IBM's AlphaWorks with QEDWiki) and Lotus Foundation (a new appliance for SMBs). The attention of this new appliance is as an autonomous device working potentially in conjunction with Lotus Bluehouse (a SaaS service targeted at SMBs). I'll write another blog entry about Lotus Bluehouse when I learn more as this represents in my view a significant change in IBM's business model for the SMB market where again in my view, IBM has difficulty competing with Microsoft. There are also elements here that have not been formulated for engagement through the traditional software channel.

There were a few other products mentioned in the speech, feel free to leave a comment if you think they should be mentioned. 

The Web 2.0 moniker was used a lot, I believe it was referring to Client Side Aggregation (CSA) and improved responsiveness to user requests through the use of AJAX components. Lotus Connections and Lotus Quickr have components that are considered Web 2.0 by some through using collective intelligence. That is the more that participate the better the experience that is had by an individual.

What really intrigued me about the opening speech was the last slide, where it was mentioned what would be coming in future Lotuspheres - "Immersive Collaboration" got my attention and I wished that they had spent some more time on the items mentioned.

After the opening speech there were two streams, one more specifically for Lotus Notes/Domino and the other for WebSphere Portal & Social Computing. I attended the later stream, which from my observations had a significantly lower attendance then the former stream.

WebSphere Portal 6.1 which is in Beta at the moment, now has a stronger focus on Client Side Aggregation and on the use of REST based services wiht some emphasis towards RSS/ATOM syndication. There are going to be more accelerators (combinations of WebSphere Portal & supporting products targeted at a vertical business problem eg Web Content Management) with the WebSphere Portal Enterprise accelerator being a combination of them all.

It was interesting to see more of the Social Software tools such as Lotus Connections and Lotus Mashups in action.

With the Lotus Mashups presentation, a new type of widget was mentioned being iWidget, which seemed to be an AJAX based component communicating to a Tomcat proxy server. I'd not heard of this standard before, so I've done a little sniffing through Google. I found that it is a new standard evolving being supported by IBM (found it on J Carol's blog - hope the link is correct Developerworks is down for maintenance again) through the OpenAjax Alliance  . If anybody has more information please leave a comment!

Lotus Connections ver 2.0 is slated for this year, so it might be time to install it then. Providing tools for the larger corporates to profile team members & share connections is important, but I still view Lotus Connections working behind the firewall. I did not see much emphasis for the on-demand type organisation that uses composite services from many internal and external distributed organisations (except in Lotus Bluehouse for SMBs). Hopefully we will see more about this next year!

All in all, it was a good event but more so for the traditional Lotus community. Let me explain.

Whilst searching for information on iWidgets I found the following article  - Mashups, Portal, Symphony, Sametime, and more, more, more . Under the WebSphere Portal heading, I found the following sentences "Like many in the Lotus community, I've not paid much attention to Portal in the past, because it's WebSphere. That view needs to change. Even though Portal comes under the WebSphere banner rather than the Lotus one, portals are really a part of the whole collaboration story that characterises the Lotus name. It's now far more closely integrated to the Lotus family of products."

The above statements are so true, I've come from the WebSphere Java/J2EE world and to some degree have been dragged into Lotus (some might say I have been kicking a bit) through my exposure to WebSphere Portal. The Notes/Domino way of developing applications through lotus script (especially pre Eclipse/Expeditor based Notes 8) was in my view out of the question.

I've always tried to view domino based components such as Sametime as black boxes. As I've mentioned before what excites me about Lotus is the products that are not Domino and lotus script based. To that end, what I saw in Lotusphere 2008 and Lotusphere comes to you, was a focus towards the traditional lotus shops and developers.

The question I really have is can Lotus continue to support these two camps - traditional Lotus and Java through composite applications?

Tags websphere lcty sametime lotus+connections melbourne ibm 2008 portal lotus+quickr lotus+mashups trip lotus   |  Comments 0