InformationWeek.com

Welcome Guest. | Log In| Register | Membership Benefits

June 19, 2000

InformationWeek Interview: Lotus President and CEO Al Zollar

In late April, InformationWeek editors met with Al Zollar, president and CEO of IBM subsidiary Lotus Development Corp, who took the reigns of the company just months ago. He's leading Lotus into a new era, as the groupware champ makes a play to become a knowledge-management and E-learning powerhouse.

Following are excerpts from that interview.

Send Us Your Feedback

On being asked to take the job:
The job offer was a surprise. When John Thompson (IBM software group senior VP and group executive) offered the job, I wasn't anticipating that. I focus on the job I'm doing--at the time, realigning IBM's old network solutions group. I think I cut him off and said yes before he could finish getting it out of his mouth. But I do have a philosophy that says you should take any job you have like it's the last job you'll ever get. I tend not to be a person who looks at what's next. I focus on the job I'm doing.

On whether the appointment of a longtime IBMer (Zollar spent 23 years with the vendor) to lead Lotus will change its culture: There is a strong culture here that's based on high energy. That's for certain. Changing one person is not going to change the culture of an organization. I don't want to change Lotus' high-energy culture--I want to enhance it. I'd like to think my coming here was about John Thompson picking the person he thought was best able to lead Lotus going forward. I think one thing I can do is bring an awareness of some of the untapped synergies between Lotus and IBM.

On customer relationships:
I've had the chance to travel around the world and meet with customers, our employees, business partners--really listening to people to understand the opportunities that Lotus has to create even more value for our customers as we go forward. Of course, meeting with customers is a top priority. My challenge is to make it very clear how we can create value for our customers going forward. The biggest challenge for me has been absorbing so much new information in so short a period of time.

A lot of companies, including Lotus, have come to the realization that software technologies, while in and of themselves are interesting, don't solve a customer's fundamental problems. And so we have to be much more focused on doing what it takes to create the relationships that allow us to move from a software company to a customer solution. And there's not going to be any cookie-cutter formula for that. It's going to depend on the nature of the customer problem we're trying to solve.

On the growing gap between the implementation of new business processes and technologies and the ability of people to be trained to use those processes and technologies:
This gap is the opportunity for Lotus. And this gap is clearly widening. It requires knowledge management in the broadest sense. It's my intention to have Lotus established as the franchise player in the knowledge-management and distributed-learning space as we go forward to find new ways to create value for our customers.

We think that this gap between the rate of change and the rate of learning--and the way it impacts organizations of all sizes--is a problem that someone has got to step up to the plate and solve with technology. That's what we intend to do. If we're clear on that value proposition, we'll be very successful in growing our business and returning value to IBM.

Our challenge is to turn that mindshare [that Lotus has in the E-learning and knowledge-management space] into market share.

On the need for distributed learning products:
We always hear about time to market. You don't hear people talk about "time to training" very much. What we're finding is that in some cases the time to training is exceeding the product cycle, the time to market for the product.

On Lotus' pending Raven knowledge-management software:
If you can capture the expertise of your people and find them through the network, including wireless Internet connections, and marshal them together into a place on the Internet or a portal, and if you can get them the things they need to collaborate, you can create a pretty powerful knowledge-management solution.

The software industry has a habit of talking about concepts before the technology is really ready. People conclude that it's just marketing hype. We are now bringing real technology solutions to market.

I find that when you break [the knowledge management concept] down to the simplicity of people, places, and things, customers can relate to that. I'm absolutely convinced that we have enough of the feature set in things like knowledge management and distributed learning to offer real value to customers. Will we seek to expand that? Absolutely.

On the future of Domino/Notes:
We've done very well and have established a very large business in messaging. We believe that we can continue to expand our core messaging business while extending into these new businesses.

There is an inclination in our industry to think of companies in terms of the products they offer. So Notes and Domino are very tightly associated with Lotus. We don't want to do anything to change that.

But what we do want to do is make it known that Notes and Domino, along with some of these other technologies, are really, really, important technologies for solving this problem of how do you make a large, complex, geographically dispersed organization move with the speed of a startup.

On the use of Lotus' messaging, collaboration, knowledge-management, and distributed-learning products:
In some ways what Lotus focuses on here is the workers, the workforce. We spend a lot of time talking about B-to-B, B-to-C. What about B-to-E, businesses and their relationships with their employees? That's where Lotus focuses in this E-business world that we live in. Making sure that that value proposition is clear to all our customers, all our stakeholders--including, of course, all of our employees--is a very important challenge.

On hiring and the labor shortage:
I want to look for talent wherever I can get it. There's lots going on in the outside world. New companies, new opportunities. It's an outright war for talent. And we're engaged in the war just like everyone else.

On his management style:
I like to think of myself as being the point guard on a basketball team. A point guard has to initiate the action and has to distribute the ball--and make sure that the team scores and wins.

On Microsoft, which years ago won the spreadsheet market from Lotus and now competes with Lotus in the collaboration-software and knowledge-management markets: You always have to be looking at Microsoft as a competitor. We'd be foolish to take our eye off them.

Back to This Week's Issue
Send Us Your Feedback
Top of the Page