Customers will only benefit when they have solutions better suited to their needs at a reduced overall cost, either because their costs went down or because they can now afford technology (thanks to a lower price per user) that would not have made sense financially before. IBM's next generation email product, which will ship in Q2 of this year, is an excellent example of standards-based technology that offers a favorable return on investment to customers for whom email technology did not previously make sense financially. The product, which runs on WebSphere and used a DB2 database as its message store, is a lightweight Web-based email application that targets customers for whom Domino would simply be too costly.

A harder question might be, "How does this benefit existing Domino customers?" The short answer is that it does not. However, the first lane in IBM's two-lane road remains the Domino lane, and there are many benefits in Domino version 6 and beyond that improve functionality, performance, and scalability.

The future of Domino
From the first early announcement of IBM's next generation collaboration technology plans, tough questions have been asked about the future of Domino, and various rumors have circulated in the Domino community. After delving into the technology and market issues above and speaking with several Lotus executives, it is clear that IBM's commitment to Domino is actually unchanged. At the same time, a significant new effort, involving a $1 billion investment, according to Ambuj Goyal, is being undertaken. This new effort is aimed at markets and based on competitive factors basically unrelated to Domino. At the same time, IBM's Java-centric, standards-based overall technology strategy aims to achieve a broad and ambitious goal much larger than any single product.

Like any bold move in business or technology, IBM's software strategy and next generation collaboration plans involve risk. Today, IBM's strategy and the NextGen collaboration products are yet to be proven. Nonetheless, IBM has unique advantages on its side, including the Lotus software organization, the Domino product, and a substantial community of Domino developers and business partners with deep expertise in collaborative technologies. If any company can create a new class of network-centric collaboration products built on Java and Internet standards and open them up to a wide array of developers, that company is IBM.

DominoPower Contributing Editor Nancy Hand is primary Notes admin at a remote site for a large corporation. She earned both Novell and Microsoft certifications in network engineering before being introduced to Lotus Notes. The 3,000 users she supports constantly challenge Nancy to keep up with their creative missteps. With a background in art, she brings a different perspective to working with computers and their users. In the past, Nancy has worked in the fields of accounting, criminal justice, and museum display. To balance the challenges of the job, she continues to draw and sculpt between stabs at writing novels and designing knitware.