Quest acquires Proposion

Quest Software and Proposion just signed an agreement for Quest to acquire Proposion (details will not be made public). The Proposion products augment Quest's Lotus Notes to Exchange migration tools with SharePoint migration and integration capabilities, making the entire Quest solution set the most complete package in the Notes to Exchange/SharePoint/.NET migration and integration market today. While there are few vendors in this domain, it is a market that is highly competitive and instrumental in Microsoft's compete strategy with IBM Lotus - or what Microsoft calls the "Notes Transition" space.

Immediate plans from Quest include streamlining the suite of Proposion tools into bundles that will offer solution sets for migrating and integrating Notes and SharePoint. Proposion recently updated its Portal Migrator 4.0, which supports the migration of content from IBM Lotus Notes, IBM Lotus QuickPlace, and IBM Lotus Domino.doc into SharePoint, all via server-based utilities that can be accessed by users anywhere on the network. The tools also provide utilities to convert Notes documents into InfoPath forms on-the-fly during migration and will convert/preserve document links to SharePoint and Notes regardless of where the linked-to document resides. The Proposion tools are built on top of the core Proposion N2N Notes to .NET data connectors that support the migration and coexistence of Notes and SharePoint applications.

Quest's acquisition of the Proposion solutions complements other Quest management and support tools, and presents a significant challenge to other vendors in this space, including Microsoft, CASAHL Technology, and BinaryTree. Of course, Microsoft ultimately still benefits, despite offering its own (limited) integration tools, since the broader context is migrating enterprises from IBM Lotus products to the Microsoft product suite.

Still, migrating Notes applications to SharePoint (or other platforms) is very challenging, and a hurdle Microsoft has not completely overcome. The consolidation of Quest and Proposion illustrates that the solution is not a found in a single tool but through a combination of data and application logic utilities that support the intermediate steps required to be successful.

We can expect that IBM will respond, as it is otherwise faced with the prospect of watching intensifying competition for the opportunity to migrate organizations from IBM Lotus products to the Microsoft suite.  The Quest/Proposion deal was relatively small in terms of the deal size, but it will likely have important consequences for the broader superplatform competitive landscape in collaboration and content management.

See you in Miami ...or Phoenix ....or Barcelona

Blogger: Karen Hobert

September has been consumed with planning and preparing for a series of events that I will be presenting at in October. My fall tour schedule unravels as follows:

On Monday October 1st I kick off my tour in Miami at the Advisor Summit. This event will bring together IBM Lotus, Microsoft SharePoint and .NET, and Novell professionals to talk all things communications and collaboration. I will be doing a keynote entitled "Thriving in an E 2.0 World: New Realities in Communication, Collaboration, and Content Management". I'm really looking forward to this talk, I think it's going to be a lot of fun!

On Thursday October 4th I'll be delivering a one day workshop, "SharePoint and Office 2007: New Enterprise Collaboration/Content Opportunities and Risks" at the first Burton Group Institute event in Scottsdale, AZ. I'll be delivering the workshop with Craig Roth, Service Director of Collaboration and Content Strategies services at Burton Group. The day promises to be chock-full of interesting information and discussions on deploying SharePoint in the enterprise.

But wait, there's more...

Catalyst Europe is at the end of October in Barcelona Spain. I'll be repeating my talk on Catalyst North America (June 2007) on IBM Lotus in 2007 and the marketplace. I will also moderate a vendor panel on collaboration and content trends. The panel will include:

Rob Gray, Product Marketing Manager SharePoint Technologies (Microsoft)

• Doug Coombs, ECM Product Marketing (IBM)
• Phil Karren, Product Manager, GroupWise and Collaboration (Novell)
• Javier Cabrerizo, Senior Director, Enterprise Content and Collaboration Services (Oracle EMEA)
• John Robb, VP of Marketing and Product Management (Zimbra)

I am expecting it to be a lively discussion!

So hopefully I'll get a chance to see you at one of these events! I'll be easy to spot in my Burton Group logo shirt!

Yahoo! Acquires Zimbra

This is big news in the open source e-mail and collaboration market. I've been very impressed by Zimbra over the last couple years. In fact earlier this month I began working on a report that focuses on Zimbra as a leader in next-generation e-mail interfaces. Wanna know what e-mail might look like in the next five years? Take a look at Zimbra. This news doesn't change the plan but it alters some of the commentary.

Admittedly this isn't surprising news. Not that I had inside knowledge of the acquisition but I knew it was only a short matter of time before someone might jump in and snatch up Zimbra. However I did not expect it to be Yahoo! (which is costing me a couple bets). Smart move for Yahoo! since it not only gets a enterprise ready, hostable e-mail platform, it also gets some really savvy technical talent that may help jumpstart its so far unsuccessful attempts with the enterprise market.

One natural fit for Zimbra at Yahoo! is that Zimbra is built for hosting, in fact Zimbra provides white label e-mail software to many large ISPs around the world. According to Zimbra, it currently has 9 million licensed mailboxes and around 50% of them are hosted. Zimbra also brings with it strong presence in the EDU and GOV markets and if you take a look at the roadmap for Zimbra 5.0 (due Q32007) Yahoo! offers a lot more than Google or Hot Mail, including:

• Off-line client
• Push e-mail to most mobile platforms
• Outlook 2007 support
• External directory support
• Integrated archiving and discovery

What's not to like? Now that the belle-of-the-ball is off the dance card there's slim to no pickin's left if you're in the market for an e-mail platform. Now I've got to go pay off my wagers...

Yahoo! Acquires Zimbra

This episode is sponsored by the number 8

Blogger: Karen Hobert

IBM Lotus released Notes/Domino 8 to the general public today. It was a little over two years ago when Ed Brill at IBM Lotus presented the "Hannover" vision with a slide deck of designs for the next generation of the Notes Client. It was an exciting turn around for a product that had be neglected in the years preceding Ed's announcements in June of 2005. I've gone on record in at least one instance to say that the new Notes 8 client is a much needed update to an interface that had begun show its age and is likely to keep customers coming back. The modernized interface includes numerous usability enhancements, an updated e-mail client that goes beyond a facelift, integrated open format productivity editors, and new extensibility features with a retracting side-bar for in-context interaction with other applications such as Sametime, Activities, and 3rd party applications. The major development with the Notes 8 client is the Lotus Expeditor-based client configuration which is an IBM extended version of the Eclipse.org Java-based, open source rich client platform (Note that there is a Basic configuration of Notes 8 that is not built on Expeditor for those who want to opt out). The new rich-client platform makes it easier to extend the client interface as well as build and deploy composite applications that can run inside the Notes client. This new development model frees up the Notes desktop from only supporting Notes-based applications to supporting applications that can use components from multiple application sources. This is likely to be very attractive to large enterprises that have many business process applications and will keep users inside one desktop client rather than channel switching to accomplish common tasks. Of course this announcement also include Domino 8, which has also had some major enhancements with regard to performance, e-mail management including message recall, provisioning of software components and composite applications, and web service consumer capabilities. Still the big news is Notes 8. The focus has been largely on the Notes 8 client, and although IBM Lotus has said that is works on all platforms right now customers can only buy Windows or Linux based clients, Macintosh users will have to wait. (BTW, check out Volker's blog to see more hot off the press reactions to Notes/Domino 8) All of the nice updates to the Notes Mail and Calendar interfaces are not in the Domino Web Access (DWA) version. And what about Designer 8 which had some additions but has not been ported to the Eclipse-based platform? IBM Lotus has been busy this year with three new products - Notes/Domino 8, Quickr 8 and Lotus Connections - hitting the market. Now that they are out there it's time too see how IBM Lotus will evolve its web client and development strategy.

Argh Matey, it's a business model!

I just finished reading a great Vanity Fair article on Internet piracy and how Hollywood just isn't getting it. If you get through the first part where author Steve Daly amusingly chronicles his piracy - including some handy tips - you get the low-down on the raiding of the Pirate Bay offices in May of 2006 and the Hollywood puppet-masters behind what has turned out to be a Swedish political nightmare.

Apparently Anne Sweeney, President of Disney-ABC, in her 2006 MIPCON address, hits the nail on the head by calling piracy a business model and that it "exists to serve a need in the market". Right-on! Now there's someone in this town who gets it. While I'm not endorsing piracy, it certainly is a model for easily acquiring content that may be harder to access using traditional media distribution models.

Daly wraps up the article with the following query:

So, the question remains: Will Hollywood adapt and survive, or will it continue to escalate its apparently futile battle against the collective intelligence of a million resourceful and highly motivated computer geeks worldwide? (The kind of people who recently unlocked the supposedly resilient copy protection on Hollywood's new HD DVD format.) Once again, the situation was adroitly summed up in the words of Anne Sweeney, no matter how unpalatable they may have been to the lunchtime crowd at the Ivy. In her 2006 MIPCOM speech, Sweeney plaintively stated, "We want to go wherever our viewers are. Viewers have control and show no sign of giving it back.''

It's article like these that encourage me to renew my VF subscription, even after I angrily swore it off when they published the TomKatSuri photo-sploitation. But hey, I don't need the print publication, I can avoid the nauseating perfume ads and just get the good content on-line! Arrrrggghhh!

Pirates of the Multiplex: On The Web: vanityfair.com