Ambuj Goyal reappeared to lead a rather cringe-inducing "panel discussion" with some Lotus customers. After that were the traditional demonstrations introduced by Bryan Simmons, Lotus VP of Marketing followed by Jeanette Horan, who is VP Lotus Products, meaning that she owns the development of the Lotus brand products. Simmons and Horan talked about the two parallel lanes of NowGen and NextGen, which generated more confusion than certainty. I'm afraid the Lotusphere opening demonstrations these past few years aren't what they used to be. Anyone remember Mussie Shore's demo at Lotusphere '95? But Alan Lepofsky tried quite hard.

Sorting out NextGen and NowGen
So the big message at the opening session was the Nextgen/NowGen strategy. NowGen describes the current set of products: Notes, Domino, Sametime, Quickplace, LearningSpace, Discovery Server, and so on, mostly based around Notes and Domino. NextGen is the "next generation," built on J2EE, which basically means WebSphere.

What didn't come over well in the opening session was the relationship between these two technology families and the expected lifespan of the NowGen products, particularly Notes and Domino. In the closing session, Bryan Simmons and Jeanette Horan re-appeared, this time in Lotus yellow polo shirts, and they re-iterated, much more clearly, what the roadmap is. So here's the full story.

NowGen
First, Notes and Domino remain an evolving product line and will be with us beyond "any horizon that I can see," according to Lotus' Art Fontaine. He is a Senior Marketing Manager at Lotus in the Advanced Collaboration Group and has the responsibility for Notes and Domino. I think it's fair to say that this should cover the next five years at least.

Next, there is to be a one billion dollar investment in Lotus products, which Ambuj Goyal revealed at the Lotusphere opening session. This is not just for Notes, it's for all of the Lotus product set. It's for product development in the large, so it's not just for development, but also for product marketing and so on. Now I'm not in a position to analyze in detail how far one billion dollars will actually go, nor do I know what the current investment levels are, so I can't comment on whether this is a big deal or not.

What I can say is that what Lotus is doing aggressively with Notes and Domino is to leverage IBM's existing technology in the product set. Specifically it's to use IBM's plumbing components in the ND product line and release the Lotus developers to create new collaboration function on top of that plumbing, rather then spending their development dollars on Lotus' own plumbing. We've seen that happen already in R5 with transaction logging based on work already proven in DB2.

We've also seen this in last year's Garnet controversy, where Lotus pulled their JSP engine from ND6 late in the beta cycle and instead shipped Domino 6 with a copy of WebSphere Express, which can be used instead of the old Domino servlet engine. ND6 uses Tivoli components in the Administration client. They are adding a Domino plug-in to WebSphere Studio so that WebSphere developers can get access to Domino data. And they are even taking Lotus plumbing, in a way, and putting that to use elsewhere, in that the work on RAD capabilities in WebSphere Studio is based on Lotus know-how and the work we've seen in Domino Designer. Jelan Heidelberg, Business Manager for Lotus at IBM's eSeries division, told me that they are using Sametime with the eSeries console program to enable administrators to "chat" with the eSeries machine in the vent of problems. And I saw a demonstration by Scott Prager of the DB2 interface to NSF that is expected to ship in ND7. More on that in a moment.