IBM Lotus Advisor — IBM’s Mike Rhodin on The Future of Lotus

Liz Novak — February 2007
ADVISOR talked with Lotus General Manager Mike Rhodin about what’s coming soon from IBM, and how he sees Lotus software evolving and improving. Here’s what he had to say.

ADVISOR: Can you give any clues about what we can expect from IBM at the start of 2007?

RHODIN: I think the simplest way to think about what we’ve been focusing on over the last year and what people will be seeing in 2007 is an increased focus on the user. In the past few years we’ve done a lot of work on making the Notes/Domino infrastructure more robust, secure, scalable, cross-platform — lots of really good stuff, but it’s for the IT audience, not the user. Our focus has shifted. We understand that the user is who we serve, and we’ve fundamentally changed our approach to how we’re going to design and develop products for the user. This approach is going to be all about delivering more capability in a way that is consumable for line-of-business users.

As you might expect from the timing, this year’s Lotusphere is nigh. There are some announcements on the way, presently embargoed. I’ll examine them next week at the IT Analysis site.

Microsoft normally announces something about now to try to attract wavering punters to its products. The Lotus faithful treat these ’spoilers’ with contempt, their blog sites typically showing (in their minds, anyway) the infeasibility or unattractiveness of the latest Redmond offering or, now and again, scornfully pointing out its rapid withdrawal. It all makes for Wimbledon-like fun for the unaligned observer.