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

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

It should be WebSphere Portal vs Sharepoint not Domino vs Sharepoint

By Nick Hortovanyi

I've been following the debate over at Ed Brill's blog regarding Domino vs SharePoint redux, a week in the field. This debate is scaring me as the focus is just not correct. I know the Domino guys, have that Notes/Domino as their prime concern because of the experience they have with the product. But the fact remains that the Notes/Domino combination is not Portal technology, which Sharepoint is (even though they have removed that term from the name of the current version).

WebSphere Portal was placed into the Lotus brand and it is about to become a core part of the new Lotus Notes strategic platform through Lotus Expeditor. Lotus Notes 8 and Sametime 7.5 has been developed using Lotus Expeditor 6.1. Am in the process of gaining confirmation from Cisco regarding when the Cisco Unified Personal Communicator will be shipped based on Lotus Expeditor.

The ability to create composite applications, with multiple technologies, and have these applications accessible across multiple platforms and pervasive devices seems to be foreign to some of the Lotus Notes/Domino guys. The main discussion, in the comments on Ed's blog was around Workflow, there is an excellent article on user created and managed workflow, in WebSphere Portal 6 at developerWorks here, I must try it out and have it available to demonstrate to clients.

However, WebSphere Portal is not completely dependent on Lotus Domino infrastructure and it competes in its own right against Microsoft Office SharePoint Services 2007. The new WebSphere Portal Collaboration and WebSphere Portal Enterprise offerings include a number of products inclusive of some of the Lotus Domino based infrastructure components. Lotus Quickr and Lotus Connections whilst also being stand alone products reinforce the potential strategic investment that an organisation is making with the Lotus brand and WebSphere Portal.

If WebSphere Portal is part of the Lotus brand then Lotus people should be promoting it. Leading with Lotus Notes and Domino will surely push existing Microsoft Exchange clients closer to Microsoft Office Sharepoint Services.

What excites me about what is occurring in Lotus, is the products evolving that are not based on Domino and Lotus Script!  

Tags websphere lotus domino portal ibm sharepoint microsoft   |  Comments 6

IBM vs IBM in SMB

By Nick Hortovanyi

Ed Brill in a recent blog entry "Two views of Lotus in SMB", is asking readers to comment on a couple of memes regarding IBM and SMB.

From the land down under, my external observation, is that with the IBM classification of organisations that there are few organisations that do not fall into IBM's SMB classification. So the assertions mentioned are quite relevant. What we see here, is great software, that normally has quite a large learning curve. I can attest to the time spent learning some of it. Don't have time to do twin PhDs in computer science and comparative philology as am busy with usage of the actual IBM technology. This can become all encompassing with no time left for other educational learning activities.

Unlike in the US, us Aussies normally span many roles, and tend to be specialists in multiple complementary disciplines. So when we see different products for different roles, the eye balls roll back, as we would much rather have a single product with the flexibility to on-demand enable the roles to suit the tasks we are performing. This sounds simple, but is really costly to purchase all the licenses. When we seeing on-demand pricing for the WebSphere and Rational development tools? - it may help us down here, we are normally early adopters!

In the past we experimented with offering a combined package of IBM Software (WebSphere Portal Express then Workplace Services Express), Linux and IBM Hardware to overcome some of the issues mentioned in Philip Storry's blog entry - "tragedy" of IBM Lotus in SMB. Our intention was to use IBM Express software and overcome the internal learning curve issue, through implementing a repeatable on-premise solution.

This sounded really great and we got a lot of initial support from various programs and IBM Marketing. Lots of effort was put in to engaging with IBM.com and IBM client executives. What we found in practice was, if there was a decision between helping us sell our combined solution or selling some X Series hardware, knowing that the customer had budget, to make this quarter's sales targets. The X Series hardware, like a new SAN won out every time. Our focus was really on software, so another Business Partner profited from the SAN hardware sale.

Also we noticed during this period, that IBM was advertising X Series hardware on the popular IT related web sites. I think the slogan was "... and best of all, it comes pre-installed with Microsoft Small Business Server".

So in IBM vs IBM, IBM wins - this leads me to ask when will something be done by IBM to give a fairer playing field for its own software against Microsoft on its own X Series hardware? This may be controversial, but I can see as the software percentage of total revenue for IBM rises, that it must be looking to sell off the X Series division to give its own software more of a chance!

So to answers Ed's question "Do you agree or disagree with Charles and Philip?" I would say IBM needs to enable its SMB software to be provisioned in a SaaS off-premise model. To overcome the issue of the quarterly incentified client executives and direct sales representatives, this should be done by certified Business Partners that have the interest of the clients and the running of the software service as prime importance!

Tags smb ibm lotus saas   |  Comments 3