Bloggers on Mike Rhodin’s CTC2006 keynote

June 21 2006

I may be in Boston, but unfortunately I'm not attending the Collaborative Technologies Conference going on across town.  Yesterday, IBM's Mike Rhodin gave a plenary address, which has been covered in a couple of blogs.

Stowe Boyd writes:

But it is strangely bizarre and at the same time sensible to hear the old spun as new, since it is the venerable IBM, now struggling to make the 15-year-old Lotus Notes seem to be innovative and well-suited to the challenges of a new century with its Hannover release. While Mike is saying some words that I strongly agree with -- that is all about people, and not so much about information -- at the same time, the majority of his slides are really about moving bits around. I applaud his efforts to help companies leverage ideas like mashups, and other web 2.0 ideas, but the Lotus model is just not going to be the answer to the questions enterprises are going to be asking in the immediate future.
I left a comment on Stowe's site -- asking why exactly he believes that the Lotus model is not going to be the answer.  I think the notion of composite applications at the desktop is a very compelling model for moving collaboration forward.  It isn't just positioning old-as-new, it's truly an innovative move forward for the Notes platform.  I hope Stowe will clarify his thinking.

Ross Mayfield covered the session details:
Organizations have been investing in productivity through very formalized systems,but that profit has been maximized, and they now are looking to collaboration for further gain.  Personal productivity in the 1980s focused on standalone use and authoring tools.  Team productivity in the 1990s was driven by LANs with proprietary client/server, doc formats, multi-year development cycles and a focus on email and documents.  Open standards and open source are about to break this open.  Next is what they call the Dynamic Workplace.  Standards, open source, composite applications across boundaries, SoA, etc.
But his very next sentence captures something that I've been concerned about:
The slide lists lots of buzzwords, but doesn't say what the focus of this era is.  
We've been talking internally about the need to have simpler, cleaner vocabulary to talk about composite applications, activities, the open Eclipse-based platform that the future Notes is being built on.  There's so much innovation coming all at once that I believe the concepts are becoming almost overwhelming.  And there needs to be some clear definition of why the Notes proposition is unique and compelling.  We're not to those words yet.

Alan Lepofsky was at CTC, and covers a number of sessions in his report.  I talked to Alan later in the day, and he was still jazzed about how Ross ran his session.  Very interactive.  Alan came away realizing how far ahead IBM is in adopting social software tools to our own enterprise, but that we need to do more to evangelize using these tools (such as blogs and wikis) on top of the Notes/Domino platform (esp. with the coming tools in 7.0.2).  Of course, if you are reading our blogs, you may think we're there already -- but it's clear from what Alan heard that the vast majority of companies aren't there yet.

Alan also had a lot to tell me about the session that Peter O'Kelly and Mike Gotta from Burton Group conducted, comparing IBM IBM and Microsoft in the collaboration space.  I think they gave a very balanced report out (though I do wonder why there's no mention of MS's aborted "Kodiak" project), giving points and criticisms to each vendor fairly.  Worth checking out.

The conference is still in progress, so maybe we'll all have more goodies to take a look at, and start envisioning the future of collaboration.

Update: The video of Mike Rhodin's keynote is now available.

Ed Brill | Boston, MA USA Category:  In the news  Add/View Comments [20]

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  1. 1  Ben Poole http://benpoole.com | 6/21/2006 11:25:30 AM

    Good to see an IBM presence at the conference this year! As I posted last time round, IBM's absence in 2005 was somewhat curious. I agree with you that the sooner organisations like IBM can get away from buzzword compliance in their presentation material, the better ;o)

  1. 2  Volker Weber http://vowe.net | 6/21/2006 12:21:35 PM

    I am quite amazed how often Mike says "wiki" without having anything to bring to the table.

  1. 3  Bob Balfe http://balfes.net/blog | 6/21/2006 12:21:46 PM

    Another critical point being missed here is the wide acceptance of Eclipse as the core platform of the Hannover client giving it interoperability with all eclipse based products by IBM and everyone else. IBM is betting huge on Eclipse (as they should) and more importantly it brings in a whole new set of technologies based on OSGI giving the new Notes client a solid entry onto the SOA highway. Composite applications are a huge step in this direction with the Notes, Eclipse and Portal programming models becoming tightly integrated and similar across implementations.

  1. 4  Carl http://www.iminstant.com | 6/21/2006 1:07:20 PM

    "It isn't just positioning old-as-new, it's truly an innovative move forward for the Notes platform."

    This isn't strictly true. What is a composite application? The merging of data from different sources, different applications hosted in a single application. This has actually been possible for a number of yeares since you could embed ActiveX objects within the Notes client. Then Notes allowed the embedding of Java applets also. The Notes welcome page could be considered a composite application, a clock, email and calendar data?

    Browser pages can contain composite applications at the most basic level through something as simple as frames, and with preoperly configured servers etc. you can even have frame - frame communication/actions etc.

    What's the definition of "Composite Application" that makes it new? New for Notes or just a new way of delivering it in Notes?

  1. 5  Bruce Elgort http://takingnotes.openntf.org | 6/21/2006 1:33:05 PM

    @Carl,

    { Link }

    So it looks like IBM and Sun have spent some big bucks on Composite Application advertisementing. The IBM link brings you to IBM's SOA page.

    But I do see your point about having had this type of feature set for years. I do think that IBM needs to educate their Notes/Domino development community on their definition of "composite applications" with respect to Hannover.

  1. 6  Ed Brill www.edbrill.com | 6/21/2006 1:59:10 PM

    and just this morning, we discussed the need for a white paper on the topic.

    There was a great presentation at Lotusphere about composite apps -- I don't know if it is online. Yes, you could embed ActiveX or Java applets, but one of the primary differences is the interplay between plug-ins ... being able to click on a document in one and have it populate a document in another. It's not just embedding.

  1. 7  Carl http://www.iminstant.com | 6/21/2006 2:01:28 PM

    @6 interplay was/is still possible

  1. 8  Tim Latta  | 6/21/2006 2:05:02 PM

    "composite application" = the new "click to action"?!?

  1. 9  Ed Brill www.edbrill.com | 6/21/2006 2:09:08 PM

    @8 actually, yes -- but client-based, not server-based. And more of a standard way of doing it.

  1. 10  Bruce Elgort http://takingnotes.openntf.org | 6/21/2006 3:11:07 PM

    Feed us more oh mighty Brill. We (developer, developers, developers) want to learn more. Maybe time for another podcast on this? :-)

  1. 11  Ben Poole http://benpoole.com | 6/21/2006 4:36:45 PM

    @2 I guess IBM are rejecting the "NotInventedHere" attitude in favour of third party tools like Confluence eh! { Link }

  1. 12  Brian Vincent  | 6/21/2006 5:42:48 PM

    IBM has always loved buzzwords. When I worked there in 97 everything was "dating mining" this and "work the web" that. Most of the management didnt have a clue what they were talking about but they knew it sure sounded cool. Of course there were also more tangable things like java, linux, and blutooth.

    Now nearly 10 years later many of those 1997 buzzwords have gone on to make and impact and the rest became vapor(ware).

    There is a fine line between visionary and bull :)

  1. 13  Graham Chastney oak-grove.typepad.com | 6/22/2006 2:50:38 AM

    Good post Ed.

    I agree with you on your point on Vocabulary. There is definitely a bit of an understanding gap at the moment especially when trying to translate the technology benefits through to business advantage.

    I think part of the problem is that it all feels like a big project rather than incremental advantage and not many people like big IT projects.

  1. 14  Axel  | 6/22/2006 2:56:09 AM

    Whats often considered as buzzwords are more often than not identifiers for innovative concepts. Its not allways "old stuff in new wrapping".

    If people to easily dismiss the new concepts as "buzzwords" there is too little ability to adapt to change.

  1. 15  Ben Poole http://benpoole.com | 6/22/2006 11:06:07 AM

    @2 (again) *cough* I got something... ;o)

  1. 16  Volker Weber http://vowe.net | 6/22/2006 12:20:33 PM

    Yup. But it does not scale. (ducking and running for cover) :-)

  1. 17  Ben Poole http://benpoole.com | 6/22/2006 12:23:16 PM

    LOL. This is true. But I wouldn't try to run Amazon on Domino, nor would I try to run Wikipedia on DominoWiki :-p

  1. 18  Charles Robinson  | 6/23/2006 9:42:12 AM

    @Bruce/Carl - I'm glad to hear someone else questioning IBM's concept of composite applications. I agree that on the surface it doesn't seem all that innovative or revolutionary, and like you I have been doing this for a decade and just not giving it a buzzworthy name that caught the eye of the analysts.

    The difference is you guys probably actually understand what IBM's intended meaning is. No one I know personally does, and IBM's website doesn't help explain it.

    @13 - I would go a step further and say it's bloody overwhelming. All Ed is talking about is the innovation coming from IBM. Going beyond just the development stuff we have the added craziness of RFID, VoIP and WLAN implementations.

    @Ed - I would really like to see IBM put the horse before the cart for a change. Before you go to market with something like this have at least preliminary documentation available so people aren't left scratching their heads and wondering "Is it a dessert topping, a floor wax, or both?"

  1. 19  Randall Shimizu  | 6/24/2006 3:38:43 AM

    This is one the best speeches that Lotus has given. Mike Rhodin does a great job of helping people to understand Workplace and Hannover in laymens terms. I suggest that Lotus push this webcast very hard. I would like to see Lotus & IBM use this as a model for giving presentations on Workplace and other technoloies. Mike Rhodins presentation exemplifies the marketing message that Lotus needs to convey to the IT community.

  1. 20  Ian Randall http://www.emsoft.com.au | 6/29/2006 8:51:21 PM

    The technologies and application of Portals, Mashups and Composite Applications are becoming blurred. Without getting tied up in the technical definitions for each, they all point to a real business need, to integrate relevant data from many existing and new applications and to simplify the user interface.

    One thing that I am not clear on with the initiative for composite applications in Hannover, is how IBM/Lotus is going to address the complex issue of inconsistent data repositories spread throughout the enterprise.

    I know that SSO (Single Sign-On) is a recognition of one manifestation of this problem (multiple directory services and multiple passwords), but the same problem exists for many other key duplicated data categories (e.g. multiple customer, employee, supplier, product and asset records etc. duplicated across in multiple systems throughout the enterprize.

    In the old days, one method was to used screen scraping technologies to address this problem, but IBM must address the issue of multiple redundant (and inconsistent) data sources in order to provide a robust composite application strategy.

    I know that IBM is partnering with third party integration specialists such as BEA Weblogic, iWay, Attunity and DataDirect Shadow RTE, but for Composite Applications to become a killer application, they must fit into a much broader architectural solution.

    I am yet to understand what that architecture is?