Akiba: There's an evolution happening in the software market today with a move towards componentization and open standards. As monolithic applications create costly integration problems, vendors are responding by updating their products to support standards, and/or delivering new products built on more flexible architectures. IBM has been at the forefront of this trend.

We saw a huge customer demand for simplification from both end users and IT teams managing the many disparate infrastructures supporting organizational productivity. Today, many different tools are in use to support all the ways people work together both in the office and from disparate locations ranging from online, telephone and video, to in-person and real-time. We saw an opportunity to provide a complete collaboration environment that has highly integrated services, allowing seamless collaboration, but in a way that these services can be used on demand.

David: Let's put Workplace Collaboration Services in perspective compared to Notes and Domino. Both Notes and Domino are collaboration systems, by definition. Where does Workplace Collaboration Services fit?

Akiba: Workplace Collaboration Services is a complement to our existing IBM Lotus Notes and Domino portfolio, giving our current customers new capabilities to support increasing demands for organizational productivity. We've gone out of our way to build in integration and interoperability points with Lotus Notes and Domino, and the extended product family, because we expect customers to use them together.

We've seen this take many different paths. For example, some customers use Lotus Notes for heavy email users across the organization, but have also added IBM Workplace Messaging to their existing environment for their lightweight users. They can also take advantage of Lotus Domino Directory integration. Other customers are seeking new ways to improve productivity across global teams. They really like the tight integration of our team spaces with Web conferencing, and of course presence awareness and instant messaging, so they add these services to their current environment. The team spaces could include Lotus Domino content, and the new capabilities can leverage an existing LDAP or Lotus Domino Directory. As we continue delivering on interoperability, you'll see things in the future like the integration of IBM Workplace Web conference information with a Lotus Notes calendar entry.

David: Let's also put Workplace Collaboration Services in perspective compared to WebSphere. IBM has a number of solutions-building environments. When should you use each?

Akiba: Workplace Collaboration Services has been built on top of IBM WebSphere Application Server and IBM WebSphere Portal--two key components in our infrastructure stack. At a simple level, the application server is the runtime, and the portal gives us a user-interface framework that supports componentization by allowing exposure of the user interface in portlets. Workplace Collaboration Services adds core collaboration services into this mix. It's not a choice of using one over the other, it's more about expanding the palette of colors with which you can paint. If the business requirements of the application call for people working together then you'll want to include some or all of the collaboration services.