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January 25, 1999

TechView:
An Alliance They'll Hate In Redmond

ast week's Lotusphere conference in Orlando, Fla., was the stage from which Lotus and IBM finally launched their combined E-business platform strategy. And while it isn't designed to bring Microsoft to its knees--much of Lotus' strategy turns on integration with Microsoft clients and server products--the plan certainly assures a bright future for Domino on multiple fronts. And it's bound to feed the paranoia that grows daily in Redmond.

The availability of Domino 5 was delayed a few weeks, but Lotus is using the delay to assure that the release and the other products tied to it land on target in tight formation. Lotus has beefed up release 5 as a Web platform with the bundling of IBM's WebSphere Java application server and support for JavaScript and HTML (as well as Java) within Domino applications. The Windows NT Server version of release 5 will integrate with Microsoft's Internet Information Server for Web serving.

Enough? Nope. Lotus will also expose Domino methods to Java applications and other software through IBM's implementation of Corba and the Internet Inter-ORB Protocol, making it possible for developers to build Enterprise JavaBeans and servlets that integrate directly with Domino. Lotus has also beefed up Domino's directory services capability--it can now manage 1 million user accounts (and tens of thousands of simultaneous connections) and act as an effective public key infrastructure for E-commerce applications--several quarters before Microsoft even gets Active Directory Service out the door.

And Domino Designer will make it much easier to create interactive, customized Web content. If you'd rather not use Domino's native development tool, release 5 will provide integration with HTML authoring and Java development tools such as Microsoft's FrontPage, NetObjects' Fusion, Symantec's Visual Café, and IBM's VisualAge for Java. Plus, there will be a developer product bundle that includes Fusion, VisualAge for Java, and Lotus' eSuite components.

The offensive doesn't end there. Lotus' alliance with America Online for both Notes-specific AOL headline pages and integration of Lotus' Sametime real-time discussion platform with AOL Instant Messenger opens a second front in the battle against Microsoft. Lotus is preparing a coup de grace on the teamware and collaboration front before Microsoft can even muster effective resistance. And one other thing--Lotus will ship Domino for Linux this year, too.

All of this further focuses Lotus' pursuit of new business relationships to exploit--particularly Internet infrastructure companies and service providers. That makes the AOL relationship all that more interesting--and that much more threatening to Microsoft's hegemony. Got a messaging server you'd like to exchange?