Papows Discusses "Yoda" and Mail Migration

On the eve of the commercial ship of Notes/Domino 5.0--arguably the most important new version of Notes since the product was first released nearly a decade ago---Lotus has begun hinting about a major development project, code-named "Yoda."

Expected sometime this year, Yoda is described as a suite of knowledge management capabilities for R5 that is intended to cement Lotus' leadership in the groupware market it inaugurated and still leads with 34 million seats.

At Lotusphere 99, its annual user conference in Orlando, Fla., Lotus CEO and President Jeff Papows talked about Yoda, as well as mail migration, groupware competitors Microsoft and Novell, and Linux with InternetWeek Editor at Large Ellis Booker and Senior Editor Jeffrey Schwartz.

InternetWeek: What is Yoda?

Papows: The Yoda project is a very substantial effort to take people and human expertise and provide relevance-based search and discovery capabilities, like what we do with documents [today in Notes].

InternetWeek: How well has Lotus been able to educate the market about knowledge management?

Papows: A year ago when I started articulating our designs we got lots of "another buzz word. What's he talking about?" A year later, I think it's much better accepted - it's still early and the market is still developing. But we're over the initial confusion stage. The large companies -- the KPMGs, the General Motors, the Price Waterhouses -- now all have knowledge officers and they're flocking to us.

We've got a consortium of companies in the Lotus Institute helping us develop some of these later initiatives. We don't have a license to all of the original thought in this space, but what we do have is a great infrastructure.

Internret Week: Will products like Yoda target vertical markets?

Papows: No, we tend to view this stuff pretty much horizontally.

InternetWeek: How does this relate to Lotus' Learning Space server and your work on distributed training?

Papows: By comparison with anything else we're investing in in 1999, Learning Space was the greatest percentage R&D increase, year over year, of any area of the portfolio. I think it's just the beginning. In 1999, the plan is that distributed learning revenue will grow four times what we did in 1998.

There really isn't another distributed learning platform out there with the same kind of share that we have, so right now we're attracting a ton of content. Which is perfect because we made a very conscious choice not to be in the content business, because we don't want to put ourselves in conflict with our partners and channel.

InternetWeek: You say you sold 5 million new Notes seats in the fourth quarter. That seems counter-intuitive. Why would customers invest in a platform, Notes/Domino 4.6, that's about to be replaced with a brand-new one?

Papows: About 50 percent of the growth in any given quarter comes out of the customer base, and about 50 percent comes from new customers. The customers understand how automated the migration is. It also probably says a lot about the health of the marketplace and the amount of legacy mail migration. And the way our pricing is situated, if you buy 4.x today, you're protected [with upgrades] for 12 months.

InternetWeek: But are people really going to upgrade twice in one year, first to 4.6 and then to 5.0?

Papows: Probably. We've seen the space between migrations continue to shrink, as the tools have gotten more and more automated.

InternetWeek: Has concern about Y2K readiness played into the rush to migrate?

Papows: We don't really know, in all honesty. I think it might actually accelerate things in the first half of the year.

InternetWeek: How does the delay in Windows 2000 impact Notes?

Papows: It's a good thing for us, in the sense that the Platinum release of Exchange is obviously tied directly to the NT release. To the degree that [Microsoft] is not in a position to respond to [Notes/Domino 5.0], it's happiness for us. The other side of the coin is, we're very NT-centric ourselves and there are some things about the 5.0 release that we want to take advantage of, like Active Directory.

InternetWeek: Is Active Directory a good thing for Domino customers?

Papows: Well, it's no different than any other LDAP directory to us. It's not all that hard, actually.

InternetWeek: What about Novell's GroupWise?

Papows: It's not a bad product actually, but we don't see it in anywhere near the frequency we did a year or two ago.

InternetWeek: Speaking of Novell, are you reconsidering your support for NetWare?

Papows: We look at it every quarter. We are still supportive of it, from the perspective of directory shadowing and other things. But from an NLM perspective, we're not. There will be a point in time where it'll be easier. But right now, developing in NetWare is just too hard relative to other things.

InternetWeek: You've changed direction on Linux, and now say you'll offer a port for it. What happened?

Papows: People both inside and outside the company were bugging me, [but] at the time I just didn't want to be distracted. It turned out once we got the R5 work done, it was actually very minimal work necessary to get a Linux version done.

InternetWeek: But are you convinced there's a market for it?

Papows: I think there could be a market for it. I think it's an important trend to support. It's not today, commercially, a big deal. But I don't want to be the top drawer software company that creates an impediment that keeps it from getting there.

InternetWeek: Finally, what about vendors offering POP or IMAP mail? Is there room for them?

Papows: There's room, but it's really a sidebar. The markets have consolidated around ICE clients: Integrated collaborative environments that span both the Web and POP3 and IMAP mail. Because at the end of the day, people don't want to go through five applications.