Now if we turn our attention to "applications" such as help desk, ISO compliance, CRM etc. how many companies are purchasing these types of applications from ISV's? It seems from the discussions I have been having with many of you off-line that companies would rather have their development staff build these types of applications rather than purchase them.
So what advice would you give to a company looking to get into the business of building vertical applications for Lotus Notes and Domino? Do you believe that the "Composite Application" features coming in Notes 8 will open up new opportunities for ISV's? What do you think?
Here are some questions to think about:
Does your company purchase third party Notes/Domino applications?
Has OpenNTF effected this market segment?
Is the market different on a country by country basis?
Other related posts on Ed Brill's blog as well as John Heads.
Comment posted by Matt White07/11/2007 11:57:05 AM
Homepage: http://www.11tmr.com
In my experience (large financial houses in the City of London), I'd agree with the view of companies wanting to go with in house developed apps for Notes and Domino. The reasons are not always sound, with each business thinking that their requirements are unique when in reality they are actually pretty standard. I think there is also a perception that Domino is an app dev platform rather than one on which you install applications. Again there is no technical reason for this, just the way it's turned out, to the point where I am struggling to think of any shrink wrapped Notes or Domino application that I have ever seen installed in a corporate setting. Of course there are lots of plugins for developers etc but I assume this is not what you're talking about here.
If you can get over those hurdles I think there would be a market for some very generic applications like the ones you mentioned. The key will be to make the functionality simple enough to support as wide a range of business as possible while making them configurable enough to tweak for each individual case.
Writing the applications themselves would be pretty simple, we all know enough great developers to do that. The real key comes in the sales approach and then the support. Those initial few sales will be absolutely key but the step up from corporate development to shrink swrapped software is enormous, you can't just send an inhouse developer to sort out problems as they arise. How do you make sure that it is running properly, provide support for problems etc?
Whatever happens though, it would be a hugely interesting idea to try and kick off.
Matt
Comment posted by Sean Burgess07/11/2007 12:12:15 PM
Homepage: http://www.phigsaidwhat.com/
You might actually be very responsible for this "problem". As a semi-competent developer, the first thing I do when thinking about a new database solution is to check out OpenNTF and see if anyone has one out there. If there is a solution, it's going to be really hard to convince me to spend money on a shrink wrapped app when I can simply download one and customize it to my needs.
The problem with business applications versus development tools or Office-type apps is that every company works a little differently and there is ALWAYS some level of customization. If you ask any company executive, they believe there isn't another company on the planet that works anything like their company. And once you customize the code, you own the code or you are forever linked to the company that sold and changed the code for you.
The one time I did suggest a third party application, I was frustrated with the fact that I didn't have a full understanding of the inner workings of the application that I was supporting. I would have been happier just building it on my own. And I do not think that the composite applications in ND 8 are going to make this any better. In fact, I think it's going to make it worse, with the excetion of solutions that hook into relatively static apps like SAP.
Comment posted by Ben Rose07/11/2007 12:14:42 PM
Homepage: http://www.jaffacake.net
In honesty, some of us 'in house' potential ISV customers are so damn busy that we still don't truly know what a 'composite application' is.
At the moment, in my head, it's a dev thing and I'm an admin that still has a lot to learn around ND8 without even getting onto the dev side.
We'd probably buy more 'off the shelf' Notes apps if they were sold with an IBM badge on the box - as in made by, not made for, IBM.
Comment posted by Kevin Pettitt07/11/2007 12:30:00 PM
Homepage: http://www.lotusguru.com
Being a freelance developer/admin, I only tend to see the inside of organizations with the budget for internal development resources. So it may be of limited significance that I have rarely seen a client eager to buy 3rd-party Notes apps (not since 1998 in fact). There may well be a good number of other Notes shops (SMBs perhaps) who are more open to this sort of thing, but I have to think it is VERY expensive for small ISVs to market to these folks without some significant assistance from IBM.
At least in my world, being an "IBM Premiere Partner" or whatever just doesn't carry any great weight with potential clients. I suspect the same is true (or even more true) in smaller organizations without dedicated Lotus pros in house. It's simply not cost effective in this climate for ISV's to target their target market. If however IBM did more to play matchmaker between client's with specific needs and vendors with relevant solutions, then I could see more vendors enter the market.
The other problem I see though is how to handle support and customizations. A commercial application that is sold to a customer is usually design locked, so anything that isn't configurable requires the vendor to customize, probably for a fee. Maintenance, support, and troubleshooting are also heavily dependent on the vendor.
These challenges are often reason enough to shy away from such offerings as being to "risky". I've often wondered why IBM doesn't just do a role reversal and become a business partner of some of these ISV's, much the way I might partner with one. That way the end-client gets exposed to more and better solutions but has the comfort in knowing IBM won't abandon them should vendor support ever wane. If IBM can certify ISV applications as "server proven" (I think that's the term), then why would IBM hesitate to represent these products (even if its just to have vendor sales guys tag along on sales calls). They'd be going after more sales revenue while simultaneously solidifying the Domino installed base.
These same pitfalls are also why I see a future where more folks like myself might wrap implementation and customization services around open-source offerings. Instead of blowing the budget on a software license and then having no ability to customize later without vendor support, you spend all your money on getting the application just right and "own" the code at the end of the day. From my perspective there are several "fixed-price" services I could offer that would involve open source tools and applications, so theoretically the economics are closer to product sales than trading time for dollars. Come to think of it, IBM could get into that business too.
Comment posted by John Carini07/11/2007 12:32:54 PM
Homepage: http://www.johncarini.com
Hi Sean,
In response to your comment
"ALWAYS some level of customization. If you ask any company executive, they believe there isn't another company on the planet that works anything like their company. And once you customize the code, you own the code or you are forever linked to the company that sold and changed the code for you. "
In working for an ISV (iEnterprises http://www.ienterprises.com) we have made CRM applications that are extremely configurable - this allows you to avoid these problems.
Features like using DXL so you can add and remove fields from any form. Also macro engines that let you execute special code that related to your business logic.
Anyway I think there are some Notes applications that have the level of configurability to allow this. At least I know at least one is.
I hope this helps.
Comment posted by Ed Maloney07/11/2007 12:40:39 PM
It might be my imagination, but it seems that the number of 3rd party applications for Notes/Domino has decreased significantly over the past 5 years. I think that there is a market for these, and it has been impacted by OpenNTF and OpenSource in general. Developers will always want the option to modify purchased software, but really - who should be writing a CRM or similar application from scratch? High quality, supported applications would help to minimize the "Notes is dead" mentality in my current environment.
Comment posted by jonvon07/11/2007 01:41:40 PM
Homepage: http://jonvon.net
when we buy third party apps they tend to be things that solve problems that are sort of outside the normal domain of what we do every day. or if the problem to solve is one that you could write, but you know there will be a lot of testing and fine tuning, and a mountain of code to write, and resources are limited, then it might make sense to buy a third party app.
i think bill buchan's administrative application is a good example. none of what they are doing is all that difficult, but to really get it right, AND provide an API, to fine tune it like they have done and so forth. it is hard to reproduce that sort of thing.
one example (we didn't buy bill's software but we did buy this) - processing domino log documents and turning them into statistics (i forget the name of the template we bought for that). but we did buy it. it was put together in a clever way by people who really understand the notes environment. and for whatever reason, we didn't want to write it ourselves.
basically if the problem has to do with workflow or can be tackled with good old domino documents, then we write it ourselves. but once in a while something comes up that causes us to look to the marketplace to see if someone has written something. it's one of those things that, you know it when you see it. and seeing is probably different for everyone.
i'm sure there are some good examples floating around, i seem to be drawing a blank at the moment. hopefully i'm making sense...
Comment posted by Laurie Desautels07/11/2007 04:01:55 PM
Homepage: http://www.kryos.com
As an ISV with a vertical application (a Web Content Management tool) on Notes/Domino we do continue to see opportunity. There is a caveat though. For those mature business processes where 3rd party tools have been playing for some time, WCM being one of them, it does make sense for an organization to invest in a 3rd party tool rather then building it out themselves. The cost will likely be less no matter how you slice it.
For business processes that are less mature or are very unique (Employee Performance Management comes to mind), I believe it's a harder sell for 3rd party software. For example, while generally speaking, employee performance mgmt is quite mature as a business process, the details of the system supporting the process vary widely. My experience says that a vendor can bring experience to the table in their knowledge of building and implementing these types of systems and bring best practices to the table, and perhaps some intellectual property, but a shrinkwrap piece of software? Not sure it would fly.
As to the comment about will composite applications open up some new potential for ISVs. I'm not entirely sold on it. It's been pretty hard for portal ISVs to "sell" portlets either stand-alone or ones that integrate with other portal applications without a bunch of services work involved ... although as a consulting services firm, that's always good 
. The valuable nature of composite applications is their interaction with each other. Here's an example: We have a custom CRM and we'd like to integrate into the Notes 8 mail composite application. We'd add a new pane to the interface that lists contacts in the CRM by company and enable drag-and-drop for an e-mail to the contact name to file the email in the CRM. Frankly, we're not entirely sure if we'll be able to do it! We're working on it right now. If you are interested, here's a blog entry on this topic as it relates to portals ... http://www.cimples.com/2007/07/11/an-overview-of-the-enterprise-portlet-market/.
Comment posted by Lance Spellman07/11/2007 06:51:21 PM
Homepage: http://www.workflowstudios.com
As a reseller of several "ISV" applications, the market still appears to be there for common infrastructure needs that aren't addressed in full by Notes itself.
For example, FiRM, HADSL's (Bill Buchan) product for Notes/AD/Blackberry user and group administration has a place in the market, as do client management tools and infrastructure analysis tools, and spam/virus/archiving tools. All of the large companies have the same issues around large infrastructure management, and need vendors to solve these common problems.
However, where I do see a reduction in business purchases are in the things that are "cool apps" that use Notes as the infrastructure to then deliver some business function on top of it. They'll still pay (US) for the custom development of those items, but are not necessarily looking for a shrink-wrapped product, in admittedly, mostly very niche areas.
Overall, I think the ISV market will prosper in the new Lotus 2.0 world, but probably in ways that most of us wouldn't expect. In particular, I expect to see non-traditional Notes ISVs moving in and capitalizing on the expanded integration capabilities. So well-established companies/products in other areas (ERP, Finance, Insurance, Medical) may see opportunities to make their product "accessible" or integrated within a Notes context.
In the non-US space, over the last 3 years, I've been continually impressed with the depth of the ISV products that have been produced overseas. They typically have a DEEP knowledge of the inner workings of Notes, solve very large problems, and simply have a depth of expertise and sheer lines of code to them (read as investment) that I'm not seeing produced in the States today. Perhaps this reflects the stronger perception of Notes outside the states thats led to the ability for ISV's to make deeper commitments.
In talking with several of them, I've also developed a perception that corporations in Europe are less willing to engage consultants for work that could legitimately be done by internal resources...resulting in shops moving more toward an ISV model rather than stay in a diminishing-returns consulting pool. But what do I know, I'm a provincial Texan
@Kevin,
As for made-by-IBM, that actually happens, but in the form of acquisition. More recent examples include Bowstreet (aka Portlet Factory), Aptiva (aka Web Content Management). Admittedly, most of the acquisitions are actually things that expand the portfolio into new areas, aka Sametime and Workplace Forms, rather than adding functionality/capabilities on top of the existing portfolio.
Comment posted by Jerry Carter07/11/2007 10:00:58 PM
Homepage: http://datatribesoftwerks.com
Teamwork Solutions (Scott Good, Good Thinkng blog) here in Columbus has ProcessIt which they have sold as a composite app, perhaps without calling it that, for years - I think since at least R5. While companies seem to prefer to build their own applications, in an environment where there are a couple thousand applications and several tens of thousands of customers, it becomes impractical to build a workflow app, with custom logic, from the ground up each time.
Mark Barton and I also spent a great deal of time in 2006 working on a tool that never saw the light of day. The hold up? Marketing, building a presence, supporting the product, finding time to update it. It takes time to build this up and without the right opportunity to build it for a client (and hence make money developing the product) it's hard to even come to the point of bringing the product to market.
That said, I think for as many ideas people come up with there are opportunities to leverage Notes and Domino to great realizations. I think, with the new openness I keep hearing about coming down the pipe from IBM, it's truer than ever to say "anything is possible with Domino".
Where Open Source comes in is in the cases where people build something that is painless for them - perhaps due to strong skills or just having done it so many times in their environment it seems common but to the outside observer it is robust. Applications that are offered up as a contribution to the community can be a serious contender if the creator is dedicated to the products longevity or ease of use. I think of Julian Robichaux's OpenLog, which we have adopted as our standard logging module. Why not? it works right, has the features we need and want and is pretty solid. While it doesn't have a warranty, it has the reputation of Julian behind it. Not strictly an integrated app as defined, but a model for the Open Source approach to offering enhancements to the larger community.
I still think, Bruce, that the idea you shared with me in 05 about how OpenNTF makes financial sense is an honest approach. Julian could probably make a small income by offering professional support for OpenLog if it weren't so small, easy to use, etc. It's like the Litter Guy who picks up trash around the city and doesn't beg for money, just let's people know he takes donations for what he is doing. He isn't making a strong living, but he's paying his rent. Quite contrary to the profit driven model of launching a product and beating down doors to make sales. As long as there are clusters of brilliant people who want to make money, I think this market will exist. My advice to ISV's is do what MS does - maintain a presence, demo the product, offer freebees, bundle, etc. They by far make the most money on the worst software. 
Comment posted by Henry Ferlauto07/11/2007 11:58:12 PM
Homepage: http://www.geniusinside.com
A few comments as I work for an IBM / Lotus ISV, Genius Inside.
I think on this front, in your opening remarks you have inadvertently answered your own question. In many cases Lotus Notes is it's own worst enemy when it comes to 3rd party solutions? Why? Because it's such a powerful development platform.
There's such a good baseline in place that it doesn't take much to create some very basic, functional applications like "Help Desk" and other like applications that do get the job done.
One of the things that I have observed over the years, long before I worked for an ISV is that the more notable application ISVs like Genius Inside (Project4Domino), Interchange Solutions (Salesplace), Logic Springs (Department Calendar) have a few traits (some or all):
(1) Good user experience
There have been many ISVs past and present that make applications that frankly look like Notes applications from the 3.x and 4.x days. Most have gone away because they looked very primitive. They made the case for the do it yourselfers.
Looks and ease of use count. It's the whole reason for the existence of Lotus Notes 8.
(2) Extraordinary feature set
Working for Genius Inside, I don't know if I have an all that unique experience on this front as compared to other Lotus ISVs, but I certainly have this experience on a very frequent basis. (And I will be Gayle can relate to this from her days at GWI, a developer of a very good Help Desk application.)
In a nutshell, we make a collaborative, enterprise strength, project management suite. Many companies have developed some pretty elaborate, in my own words, "task managers." (That they will call project managers.) Basically, they can create a series of tasks with "finish-start" dependencies, notify the next person in line when their task is ready to start; alert people when things are not done on time; and keep a solid catalog of what's been done, and what has not.
What they generally can't do, and where we can, is manage resource capacities, provide gantt charts, costs, ridiculous levels of security, document workflow that essentially requires zero code, etc.
And even with the things that the in-house product does do, we take to that proverbial next level. For example when it comes to notifications (or a I like to call it corporate love spam), we have as I like to jest with our customers, "Configurable Spamability."
We have 11 different classifications of e-mail notification for all you Spinal Tap fans.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AhVWJgIzftE
Each user can elect to receive as little or as much e-mail as they want from the system. And believe it or not, this is a huge feature when it comes adoption of a program. I think any good system should have similar options. Your subscription level to a program's notifications will generally be inversely proportional to your usage of the product. If you live and breathe in a particular software product, why do you need to punch yourself in the face 87 times a day with e-mails about things your probably already know about? No likes an application that cries wolf. The configuration is a definite art form.
But I digress.
Whatever you're going to do, do it extremely well. Be the definitive subject matter expert.
(3) Fills a gap that Notes & Domino does not have
Quite frankly, when you look at the Exchange vs. Domino wars, I'm amazed that Department Calendar exists. I would have thought by now that IBM would have added some it's functionality or just outright by the whole company (it's that good).
For those of you who have used Outlook (connected to an Exchange server), you will surely know that Exchange has a feature called "Public Folders." (This feature is actually most likely going away. Well, sort of, they will force you to get that functionality with other Microsoft products like SharePoint.
http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2006/02/20/419994.aspx
But for the longest time Exchange has had the simple ability to have a simple (operative word) group calendar. So simple in fact, it's just a basic (design) copy of one's personal calendar in Outlook. Same exact look and feel, except multiple people can post to it.
Notes & Domino has no such equivalent functionality. Yes, you can create a Team Room, but many people just want a group calendar; no more, no less.
Necessity being the mother of invention, Department Calendar fills this void and brings it to a whole new level. It automatically aggregates multiple calendars into one. With Outlook you're doing double entry. You will for example block off your personal calendar with your vacation so your busy time gets blocked off, and then you'll do the same with your team's public folder calendar to "announce" your upcoming event. Department Calendar does this seamlessly.
Wrapping up...
The Notes & Domino platform gets us a foot in the door because there are many companies out there that have some need to fill and know at a conceptual level that the Notes & Domino platform is extremely powerful and they want to exploit their investment.
Find a need to fill, become an expert on that subject matter, build it very well; and they will come.
I hope this helps.
Comment posted by Peter Narlund07/12/2007 01:27:38 AM
Homepage: http://domainpatrol.org
I have been thinking for some time now where the best opportunities for ISVs are in the IBM Lotus Notes & Domino market.
My contribution is to answer the question ■■Has OpenNTF effected this market segment?■■
I have been working as an IBM Lotus Notes & Domino consultant since 1993 and during that time I have both done admin, development and teaching for other consultants.
I don't know how many times I have developed the same kinds of application for different customers. I don't know how many times I have said - "This ought to be made a shrink wrap application!", and it never was.
I think that one reason not to reuse code was that Lotus Notes made it easier to start prototyping a new application than it was to try to understand how to show the prototype of some function using an already developed application. Another reason was probably that I was a very novice developer and didn■■t know how to document an application or to write good reusable code. I think that I was a pretty representative developer of Lotus Notes applications during that time. Most of us came from @forumulas in 123 or whatever and not from doing C, Cobol, Fortran or from any kind of serious programming background. (I think this is partially true today as well).
In 2001, after being feed by the press on the revolution in the general open source initiative for a couple of years I thought I should try to understand it. I began by reading the articles ■■The Cathedral and the Bazaar■■ by Eric Steven Raymond.
In 2001 I also made a change in my consulting contracts so that all source code delivered to my customers was to be owned by me and the customer would get a non exclusive right to do whatever they wanted with the results. It was actually received much better than I thought ■C my customers realized that I could reuse code that I had previously written for some other customer and vice versa, and that this would actually benefit the customer in lowering the cost and also making the quality of reused code higher.
In 2002 I developed a framework for federated single sign on with implementation for Domino and Tomcat based on the ■■The Liberty Alliance Project■■ standard. I asked the customer if we could publish the results and make it open source. This would also make it possible for us to use some other open source code libraries http://www.apache.org] to make our work easier. So it was -my first open source project came alive but it never took off the ground.
In 2004 I rediscovered OpenNtf.org and thought that if I should really understand open source I would need to participate in this in some way and I eventually published the DominoRSS project on OpenNtf.org. When I was working on DominoRSS I realized that I would never be able to sell this as a product and I would also not be able to make it shine. I thought that it■■s better to let others be able to use it, modify it or even build on top of it rather than just lock it up for the customer.
This was the time when I started to understand that all those applications that I had developed for customers from 1993 and onwards that never was shared or reused in any way should have been made open source.
Last year I decided to make part of my product DomainPatrol open source and publish the project on OpenNtf.org ■C why?
1. The customers will want to be able to customize the database anyway
2. I could reuse other open source projects code in DomainPatrol
3. It will spread the word cheaper to developers and administrators
The feedback and the response that I get tell me that this is the right way.
This year I started a new company ■■DomainPatrol Ab■■ in Sweden based on the following business concept:
■■DomainPatrol supplies productivity tool applications for administrators and developers of IBM Lotus Notes & Domino environments.
By combining proprietary code with external Open Source we are able to cost effectively deliver valuable solutions to our customers.
Enabling integration with third■\party tools and customer■■s in■\house developed code contributes to an increased marketability of our software and extensible customer implementations.
DomainPatrol sales and marketing is provided through trade fairs, integration partners, value adding resellers and the Internet.■■
So, after all this history about me, what is my answer to your question then?
YES ■C You and OpenNTF have definitely changed the way I■■m thinking of delivering applications whether they are shrink wrapped or consulting projects. OpenNTF and other communities for open source will be a central and integrated part of our business life at DomainPatrol and I think this will reflect the market in the coming years.
Comment posted by John de Giorgio07/12/2007 02:55:54 AM
Homepage: http://www.integra4notes.com
Bruce's posting raises so many diverse questions. Here is a stab from the perspective of an ISV (Integra for Notes):-
Build or Buy
This issue has been doing the rounds for years but why do we treat Notes apps differently from other apps. Would you consider building your own Help Desk app if you were using some other environment e.g. MySQL, Oracle etc? Probably not but, somehow because it is easier to get this done in Notes (and also to get it done wrong in Notes), we seem to see many companies trying.
However, having said that, many times build is better than buy.
Reliance
Fear of a reliance on an external vendor is justified but surely so is fear of a reliance on an internal developer. I would add that dependence on a vendor is preferable to reliance on an internal employee.
Commercial software is different to in-house software
Developers used to creating software for in-house consumption are often missing the skills and forethought required to develop good commercial grade applications. Commercial software needs a lot more thought and development to make it even more configurable and more easily customised with the least involvement of development changes.
More control for the developer
In-house development obviously allows a greater element of control to the developer rather than dealing with a black-box or components which are black-boxes. Fair point but good software and particularly tools allow the developer to gain the productivity but not loose the control (plug for Integra4Notes here )
Who Buys Notes apps?
For some reason, in the Notes market, it is often Notes developers and admins that buy or recommend products whereas in other markets our experience is that these decisions are driven by the Line of Business managers or even further. As a result, developers and admins buy tools that developers and admins use. In the spirit of "No turkey votes for Christmas", most developers want to keep themselves in demand. Sorry guys but this is true.
Marketing to the Notes Community
Integra4Notes is only a small part of what our company (Shireburn Software) does. We also do financial, inventory, Point of Sale systems not in the Notes environment.
Marketing to the Notes community is actually a lot easier than most other markets because it is focused, especially if you are selling a solution aimed at the Notes installed base. There are a limited number of events, magazines, web sites, blogs etc which focus on Notes and you can market through these channels. If you are selling a non-Notes solution such as a vacation manager, then you have a much broader community you have to reach out to. This is much more expensive.
Selling to Notes Installed based is different to new Notes clients
If you are aiming your solution at companies that already use Notes, then that is a very different ball game to trying to convince a non-Notes client to implement Domino &/or Notes so as to run your application. Getting Notes into the door on the back of your app is an increasingly difficuly proposition. The credibility/awareness battle that has been raging between MS and IBM is stiill much more positive towards the MS side (although things have improved).
IBM Sales Team
While ISV apps in a client site makes Notes sticky and more difficult to remove, IBM has still not got their sales team to encourage the implementation of 3rd party Notes apps. This is an issue of compensation for the sales team as well as legal ramifications of "recommendations" let alone selling the ISV solutions. I know IBM has lots of solution catalogs and web sites with info etc. but really, the IBM sales guy at the coal face has the real influence.
Until the IBM Sales Team are actively involved in encouraging/selling ISV apps into their client sites, success will always be limited. This is a lost opportunity for IBM as well as for the ISV community.
Selling Time or Selling Licenses
Surprisingly, the choice of strategy of focusing on either selling time or selling licenses is not very well understood in the IT business (not just the Notes business). Selling licenses for a solution and then services around that is just so much more scaleable as a business than selling hours. The Notes business seems to have a larger element of one-man-band consultants selling time. They make more money from building and customising apps than from re-sale of configurable 3rd party ISV solutions. This is understandable but if they want to grow their business (and of course they might not want to), then the only way of doing that is by developing their own app, becoming an ISV and selling to a larger base.
=======================
That's my 2 cents worth. See it in the context of me being an ISV with 24 years experience (14 of which is in building Notes apps) and the company's revenue is only about 20% Notes based. 
Comment posted by Ed Brill07/12/2007 10:40:02 AM
Homepage: http://www.edbrill.com
this is a great thread and I have just linked to it.
I do want to comment on one small point of John de Giorgio's comment above. As the WW sales exec for Notes/Domino, I want to examine John's comments about having the IBM salesforce encouraging/selling ISV solutions.
This would be a huge challenge given the raw number and nature of the ISV solutions on the Notes platform. Which CRM solution to recommend? Which helpdesk is best? Who has the best tool for directory management?
Our services teams, in 1:1 customer engagements, can propose particular ISV solutions, since they would then be implementing them. But having salespeople talk about them is a much harder challenge, and I don't have a good solution for it.
Comment posted by Mike Robinson07/12/2007 11:41:54 AM
Homepage: http://www.invcs.com
I like John's comments particularly the "Build vs. Buy"- absolutely on point.
Vertical Applications however seem some what commoditzed. How many Help Desk apps are there based on Notes and Non-Notes? Help Desk as a service or shrink wrap or some free open-source solution based on LAMP? It's a hard sell but doable. We faced this decision as a potential customer. We needed a help desk system and decided to look outward vs. developing it in house. We found one that had all the bells and whistles *but* lacked integration to a billing system. We then decided to build in-house (although I don't think the vendor was particularly damaged since they were either #1 or #2 in that space for Notes).
Anyway, it's understanding the unique value-add of your product or service from the perspective of your slice of the Notes market (understanding the slice is a science in and of itself).
We build an anti-spam product for Domino. There are zillions of alternate solutions based on Domino add-ins, free stuff from openntf.org, appliances, the *big* name vendors, etc. We decided to target our product for that slice that wants to run a native anti-spam solution on their iSeries,Solaris, AIX, and Linux. This was a huge success for us since Windows is very saturated and we found customers that want to further leverage the investment they already made in those platforms.
I've always thought a "suite" of productivity tools either straight Notes/Dom apps or within the new composite framework would do well. I.e., a Help Desk, HR Employee Manager/Directory, etc. I think we would be a good sweet spot for SMB type clients (almost like a MS Small Biz server concept). It doesn't have to be the best of breed but should all be in one package. I know there was a company that did this but stopped doing it a while back.
Comment posted by John de Giorgio07/12/2007 11:49:19 AM
Homepage: http://www.integra4notes.com
In response to Ed's comment: I understand Ed's point and accept that getting IBM behind the ISV's is not a trivial task. There are issues not least of which are legal. I never said it was easy but there is value for all parties so worth trying to get our minds around the problem.
Comment posted by Chris Toohey07/12/2007 12:39:42 PM
Homepage: http://www.dominoguru.com
Here's my 2 cents - and take it for what it is:
I think I have a pretty good understanding of the ISV cycle - as I've not only worked for large-to-SMB companies that typically buy such products, but I've also worked for and co-founded an ISV...
The only advice that I would give to someone entering the ISV realm is this: don't think that you're the expert in everything about everything.
If you're an ISV with a CRM or Helpdesk product, understand that you may have an ethnocentric view of just what a CRM or Helpdesk product is, and you definately have such a viewpoint on how it's used. The very best products out there are products that allow you to configure and use the product to their own business processes, practices, and bound-to-be-unique usage. The problem with almost every solution on the market today is that they try to accomplish this with speed-of-UI costly hide-whens and "UserDefinedText001" fields littered throughout a design that's been bloatware for the past few years with outsourced developers adding copy-and-paste code snippets on top of other copy-and-paste code snippets until you get this dotNext Frankenstein application. These "Kitchen Sink" applications try to be everything at once, but sadly often leave their using looking at a flashing lightenning bolt while it tries to figure out what you want to do, what it's cofigured to do, and what it's allowed to show.
And you wonder why the majority of people want to bring this in-house...
As for the OpenNTF side of things, I hate to say this, but I don't think it's really made a dent. Think about it - the head of Sales doesn't typically come to the resident Notes geek and ask "Hey, what can I use for [enter your product vertical here]???". How many business-level descision makers are looking through the OpenNTF projects list? I've venture to guess not many...
I guess my real advice to anyone looking to get into the world of the ISV would be to get a good sales and marketing team.
I've seen Beacons won by Snake-Oil-Salesmen and Powerpoints alone...
Comment posted by Henning Heinz07/12/2007 12:50:30 PM
Entering the Notes market in 2007 as an ISV!? You are really brave but taking a challenge is a good start for becoming successful.
I have just had a horrible presentation of a Notes CRM product at a customer site (Micro SMB) and the salesman proclaimed to be the market leader in Europe (what a joke, I am still baffled).
Comment posted by Nick Halliwell07/12/2007 08:42:32 PM
Homepage: http://www.comware.net
A very interesting thread. I have been a Notes ISV and BP for over 14 years in Thailand. I agree that many companies believe that they can develop in house. The interesting thing is where we have sold Notes to a company and have tried to sell them our applications invariably they tell us that they will develop in house, but within 12 - 18 months most come knocking on the door asking to look at our apps, having failed to develop a working product in house. We have an HR system that comprises of 10 modules (nsf files) we have developed this over the last 11 years, how can any team of in house developers produce a product that can compete? Especially when we are charging only $20,000 for the base product. That's 1 man working full time in a US or European IT shop for well under a year.
IBM's role in the developer community
As Ed says its difficult for IBM, however IBM can still do a lot to explain to companies that they can save a lot of money and a great deal of time, which after all is money, if they purchase an application rather than try to develop one.
Gone are the days when even big companies need an army of developers to keep there systems going. Generally companies now have fairly static development requirements and much smaller IT depts, so when a new project comes along it just make much more sense to out source that rather than try and develop in house.
If you go back 10+ years IBM actually used to publish a Notes Software guide in which they listed all their software applications. Why not do this for IBM Business Partners. Publish a book and website that lists all the know software from BP's (local IBM reps in each country and area know who are the BP developers). IBM should not push 1 particular product but they can educate customers that there are 20k+ BP's out there many of them with good quality applications and at very reasonable prices.
OpenNTF
Has this effected the market for Notes software developers? In Asia I do not see any effect as when I tell people about it I have never never had anyone say "Agh yes seen that" or "Yes have down loaded an application". So in Asia there is very little visibility for OpenNTF.
I wonder if Business people know to go there or even know about it, or is it just for Geeks???
Also, to be brutally honest, the quality of applications available on OpenNTF is pretty poor, many of then have little real code in them and are much more like proof of concept apps rather than a real apps that someone can use. In fact this is the reason that I have not put any apps up on the site cause I think that it could adversely effect what people think. They look at what they see on OpenNTF and are not impressed then they can think that the work we produce is of the same quality.
OpenNTF is a great idea and I really do support it, but we need better quality apps AND it needs to be aimed more at Business Owners/Manager, in my view.
Comment posted by Chad Schelfhout07/12/2007 09:18:29 PM
Homepage: http://www.chadsmiley.com
Nick - I can see your point about not having many business applications. Just look at the move'n and groove'n list, there are maybe two business applications. Even the two applications that I created on OpenNTF are for developers. Is there a simple, to start, but usefull business application that someone, say me, could create that would help meet this need?
Comment posted by Nathan T. Freeman07/12/2007 10:11:44 PM
Homepage: http://nathan.lotus911.com
Nick - I'm mystified by your response here. You find the bar too low at OpenNTF for quality. And apparently you don't want to submit apps or tools to the open source community because... what... it would be slumming? You're basically saying your stuff is too good for OpenNTF. Wow.
Here's the thing about open source: it's precisely as good as the community that is serves chooses to make it. If you don't think the quality of OpenNTF applications is high enough -- well, you've got a team of developers with at least 11 years of Domino experience, right? Make 'em better. That's what open source is.
Perhaps you don't WANT them to be better. And that's certainly fair enough. As a commercial software vendor, it might not be in your best interest for !!HELP!! to be viably competitive against ServicePower. I would never ask a person to spend time and money working against their own interests. But in that case, I'm not sure where the "we" comes in in your closing sentence.
I agree wholeheartedly that OpenNTF needs more business end-user targeted projects. In the early days of the site, we tossed around ideas such as project bounties and support contracts to motivate focused development, but were unable to bring that to fruition. Perhaps now, in the wake of the success of Google's Summer of Code and OSDL, it's time to revisit those visions. Your input is certainly welcome on how we might best facilitate this.
Comment posted by Kevin Pettitt07/12/2007 11:01:17 PM
Homepage: http://www.lotusguru.com
@Nick - You're very right in that OpenNTF is more of a "Geek" domain than a place management types would get much value from *directly*, but that's just the nature of any open source software site. To get the attention of and be more appealing to non-technical decision makers, OpenNTF would need something akin to a unified marketing strategy. To have something to develop a unified marketing strategy around would require the full-time attention of professional technical staff to identify and nurture promising applications, and their developers.
Obviously, none of these things can happen without a serious financial commitment from either the corporate sector (i.e. IBM), or some altruistic internet zillionaire looking to put low-cost quality applications on all those Ubuntu laptops in Africa.
Although I don't rule out the zillionaire possibility (after all, I do still believe in Santa Clause and the Easter Bunny 
), I think its safe to say that OpenNTF will only get the attention of business-level decision makers when IBM puts some resources into it. I don't know how this will happen, but I do know its worth doing. Just as waving a catalog of ISV offerings in front of customers is a good thing for IBM, pointing to a *healthy* open source ecosystem around Domino can also boost the Lotus brand. I emphasize healthy because an unhealthy open source ecosystem would actually be a drag on the Lotus brand much the way all the crappy homegrown R4/R5 apps have been.
Personally, I have seen a noticable uptick in the number of quality applications on OpenNTF in just the last year. This was a big reason that I put together my "OpenNTF Blast" (http://www.lotusguru.com/lotusguru/LGBlog.nsf/d6plinks/KPET-73PPX3 ) presentation which debuted at the recent Irish Lotus User Group (ILUG) conference http://www.ilug2007.org . The whole idea behind the presentation was to highlight many of the best OpenNTF submissions, precisely because as you point out there are a lot of not-so-great ones to sift through.
I also recently released my "SuperNTF" project (http://www.openntf.org/Projects/pmt.nsf/ProjectLookup/SuperNTF ) on OpenNTF, which is notable for being heavily infused with code from other OpenNTF projects - OpenLog, Application Activity Tracking, HistoryClass, ASND Exporter, Blogsphere, eleMental, and more to come. The effort involved in integrating these various bits into a coherent whole is a microcosm of what I'd like to see happen more. Coordination of effort among developers, implementation of coding standards, peer mentoring, pro-active promotion of good ideas. Hopefully you will reconsider your participation, as I think there is real value for ISVs in getting exposure through OpenNTF.
Comment posted by Pankaj Sharma07/12/2007 11:07:57 PM
Homepage: http://www.shreecement.net/sysadmin.nsf
I would love to have more wizard driven apps from IBM. ISVs can always further enhance those apps.
For most of the organizations Developing an App from scratch is a major issue specially those with limited IT manpower.
Comment posted by Ben Poole07/13/2007 01:25:41 AM
Homepage: http://benpoole.com
Predictably, I'm going to focus on one aspect of this interesting discussion...
As someone responsible for a couple of the "travesties" hosted up on OpenNTF, I do take some exception to Nick's comments. But rather than get personal, let's take a step back for a moment.
Is my OpenNTF project as "robust" as stuff I code for my day job? Probably not. Does it look nice? I don't think it's too bad, but it could use some help, sure. Is it well-documented? Better than some, could do a whole lot more. Do I respond to queries and support issues? Yep, and so do others.
Oh forgot one: does it cost money? No.
Do I feel that my reputation has been tarnished by putting the project out there? No.
Nick feels that his products will be tarnished by any association with OpenNTF, and so will not contribute to help "raise the bar" over there. We appear to be in somewhat of a catch-22, do we not?
So, given that Nick can't contribute, if anyone else wants to show me how it's done "properly", how to write "real" code, then please be my guest -- I'm always up for developing my skills and enhancing my knowledge.
Comment posted by Henning Heinz07/13/2007 01:29:28 AM
I think there are probably less than 5 commercial Notes help desk applications that can featurewise compete with the !!Help!! OpenNTF project (if you leave out the web part).
Although I know that you all do not like what I say now. If you want to do advanced programming within Notes and Domino using all the bells and whistles (and hacks) that have been added over the years and push the platform at its limits (and beyond) you are far far away from a RAD platform but need to invest a hell lot of time. Unfortunately time is the worst enemy of many Open Source products and the programming often becomes ugly in a way that team development is getting complicated.
By the way if OpenNTF would offer worlds most wanted I am sure that some ISV will not be very happy about it. Open Source is a threat to many commercial software vendors, especially if the quality goes beyond a level that smaller ISV cannot compete with. I think Borland is a good example of what can happen if you do it wrong.
At the end competition is a good thing.
Comment posted by Gregg Eldred07/13/2007 08:21:52 AM
Homepage: http://www.ns-tech.com/blog/geldred.nsf
Late to the party, but at least I made it. 
I have to admit that I have thought about the ISV/Lotus market quite a bit lately. Yes, we purchase 3rd party apps. Yes, we use OpenNTF templates. And as a quasi developer, I don't think twice about using the basics of a OpenNTF template to assist me in the creation of something. Why reinvent the wheel? Use the templates as a starting point for your new application.
3rd party apps, and we have bought quite a few, assist me with daily Admin tasks, provide Help Desk services, provide exceptional group calendaring, and the like. Is there room for more? Absolutely. And with the release of Notes/Domino 8, I think that the need for Composite Applications will drive this. Since there aren't any out of the box composite applications, the market will push someone to create them. While they won't cover all of the possibilities, they will provide a foundation for those interested.
Much of what has been already written about how the current ISV's, extremely knowledgeable about Notes/Domino, create exceptional tools. This will not change in the new world. But it seems, and I am probably wrong, the players haven't changed much, if at all, over the years. I think that there is room for more.
Advice? The Notes/Domino space is alive and well. The new release of Notes/Domino will only serve to further energize the market for your product.
HTH.
Comment posted by Alan Lepofsky07/13/2007 09:27:58 AM
Homepage: http://www.alanlepofsky.net
I hope I don't get flamed for this, but as someone who works on the "Lotus Strategy team", I have to at least try and offer up the following toughts. This thread started with a question around the state of the Lotus Notes/Domino ISV space and the business opportunity. I'd like to know how many ISVs feel they just focus on Notes/Domino, and not on being a "Lotus ISV". By that I mean, Notes/Domino, Sametime, Forms, Quickr, Connections, etc. I know for ISVs time is money. Any time spent learning a new product means time away from customers. I also know we've thrown "shinny new products" at you in the past and asked you to learn about them, only to see those products go away after a year or so. I can honestly say though that I don't see that happening this time with Sametime, Quickr, Connections, etc. If I was not getting a steady paycheck from IBM and ran my own ISV, I think (I could be wrong and naive) that I would want to try and be proficient in as much of the Lotus portfolio as possible. Especially given our huge new push towards using Eclipse to make our products, allowing them to be far more customizable and extendable. I think there is huge opportunity to "fill in the gaps" both feature wise, development wise, and administration wise across the full range of products Lotus is now delivering. We have a strong focus on trying to make our portfolio "seamless", so users don't think "Now I'm in Notes, now I'm in Sametime, now I'm in Quickr, etc". As ISVs, I think this new model should provide a great deal of opportunity to build not just new Notes applications, but add extensions, connectors, sideshelf apps, and more. I hope this makes some sense, it is a topic I am speaking a lot on lately, so perhaps this calls for a podcast Bruce, not just a blog posting!
Comment posted by Bruce07/13/2007 09:34:35 AM
@Alan,
You are welcome on the podcast anytime! Let's chat offline.
Comment posted by Nathan T. Freeman07/13/2007 09:54:09 AM
Homepage: http://nathan.lotus911.com
"I would want to try and be proficient in as much of the Lotus portfolio as possible."
Alan, it sort of goes without saying that every person wants to be as proficient as possible in as many products & processes as possible. More expertise is always a selling point. The question is: what technologies are worth the investment of time?
Lotus has some great stuff emerging right now. There's better awareness of the brand and it's capabilities than Lotus has had in a LOOOOOOONG time. And I agree that there's a lot of money to be made in "filling the gaps" across those products (no comment on WHY, though )
But if that more promising than investing in Window Live development or building stuff to work with Google gadgets? That's the question. And if Lotus technologies are a good place to be, are they better as a services-business or a products-business?
Comment posted by Ben Langhinrichs07/13/2007 11:39:55 AM
Homepage: http://www.GeniiSoft.com/showcase.nsf/GeniiBlog
Alan - While you know that I have the utmost respect for you and your role, I don't really think this applies to ISVs in the same way it applies to consultants or integrators. I would rather have ten different ISVs focusing each on a different product and making a great product based on that than ten ISVs trying to focus on all the product lines. There is certainly room for an ISV to work between a couple of products, especially with applications that can use the synergy, but what you need more of is ISVs with focus. Consultants, developers, integrators, etc. should focus broadly, but ISVs should focus much more narrowly in most cases. The model you want is a JFS developing Litigator's Notebook for Lotus Notes or Kryos Systems developing its portal solututions for Websphere Portal. What good would it do to have them working with multiple product lines? Let each focus and provide extreme value in a particular area. Just my humble opinion, of course.
Comment posted by Rob McDonagh07/13/2007 12:00:01 PM
Homepage: http://www.CaptainOblivious.com
Hn. Speaking as a corporate developer who has never worked for an ISV, I am not surprised to hear a lot of ISVs proclaiming the "buy" half of the "build vs buy" debate. Most corporate developers tend to fall on the other side of the question.
But the reality is that it is never that simple. Sometimes it is appropriate to buy a solution, other times it is appropriate to build one. But even when it is appropriate to build one, it is always appropriate to buy a tool to help you build it. It is also always appropriate to spend a reasonable amount of money for an app that meets a specific and narrowly defined category, especially ones that will help make a larger system play nice with other large systems.
In my organizations, we haven't been interested in a CRM application or a Help Desk application, but we've been interested in smaller apps that can be easily intergrated with our existing systems. So, an MS-Office integration app or a reporting tool. A workflow system like ProcessIt! falls into that category as well.
The keys, to me as a potential ISV customer, are that the app should be narrowly focused, it should be highly customizable to meet corporate standards, and it should be priced and licensed appropriately. Some ISVs assume that because IBM sells into mega-corporations, their products should be priced so high that only mega-corps can buy them.
Reality is that companies DO have internal development staff, and those people are already budgeted. Software (or service) purchases, no matter how much they might help, have to be justified. As an ISV, you're not just competing with other vendors, you're competing against an internal development staff that has already been paid.
Hm. This is a very disjointed comment. I should probably have waited until my migraine was gone, but I kept meaning to respond to this thread and forgetting, so I'm afraid you're all stuck with this rather mediocre comment...
Comment posted by Ed Brill07/13/2007 03:49:50 PM
Homepage: http://www.edbrill.com
@Nick, there is an online version of the old Notes product catalog.
http://catalog.lotus.com/wps/portal/domino
I even have this as a standard link on my blog, it is also linked from the Notes and Domino product pages. Sadly, not even a fraction of current Domino/Notes partners are registered on this catalog, yet it's very easy to do.
Producing books of product solutions doesn't necessarily make economic sense today, but the concept is there and even more accessible than before.
Comment posted by Alan Lepofsky07/14/2007 06:28:57 AM
Homepage: http://www.alanlepofsky.net
and to add to Ed's comment about the Notes catalog, I try my best to keep an unofficial one going on my blog: http://www.alanlepofsky.net/alepofsky/alanblog.nsf/dx/product-catalog
Ben, that makes a lot of sense. I agree, I was not granular enough in my thinking about the different types of Partners. A product developer with a specific area of expertise certainly differs from a consultant who would handle things like ecosystem installs, and daily management of a domain.
Nathan, you bring up a very important point. I WISH is that the industry had enough common standards (or at least followed them) that the skills required were more transferable across products and companies. That would mean learning to develop for Lotus products would not differ from MS Live, Google Gadgets, etc. We are trying to help that cause by making Lotus Notes, Sametime, etc run on Eclipse, therefore hopefully opening up our ecosystem to all the Eclipse developers out there. Also it should help reduce the barriers between being a "Notes Developer" or a "Sametime developer" for example. Do you agree with our approach here vs. staying proprietary and locking not only our customers in, but also the developers?
Comment posted by Nathan T. Freeman07/14/2007 02:42:27 PM
Homepage: http://nathan.lotus911.com
Alan, I'm going to answer this here, but I'll also point out that if you go check the Notes 8 DP forum, you'll find a more frank answer to your question...
Basically, I think the idea of making it possible for Eclipse developers to build cool Notes apps is great. I find myself questioning the wisdom of what it's taken to make this happen. Turning Notes into an Expeditor application has been an enormously expensive and high-risk venture. And while I think it's been by and large successful, it remains to be seen whether there will be a serious ecology of Eclipse-based Notes-integrated apps. As a Design Partner, I have been very upfront with IBM about my concerns that you guys are overestimating the impact composite apps will actually have.
Then again, my opinion is tempered by the fact that I have LOOOOOONG thought that IBM completely underestimates the power of Domino as a development platform. It's not as bad now as it was in 2001, but even just a few weeks ago, I saw IBMers trumpeting a composite app as "something you couldn't do with just Notes" that looked like something I'd built in a few hours for a customer.
I mean, could we really rely on the core dev team to follow the chain of thought that leads to this? http://www.lotus911.com/nathan/escape.nsf/d6plinks/NTFN-7535BS They're talented developers, for sure, but the bulk of them just don't participate in the sphere that gives rise to those kinds of solutions.
So the most direct answer I could give you is "I agree with the general concept of making Notes a more powerful dev platform, but I firmly believe that you should showcase it more effectively by delivering an Eclipse toolkit to your existing Domino developer base that's useful." And if you want my advice on how to do it: find 3 good Eclipse developers that know how to build composite apps and assign them to work on 3 OpenNTF.org projects. Have them ask those project chefs "what could we build for you as a composite app that is currently truly insurmountable with Designer alone?"
Then contribute those results to the community.
*THAT* would be a great demonstration of your new direction.
Comment posted by Bob Balaban07/14/2007 03:53:31 PM
Homepage: http://www.bobzblog.com
@Nathan - Actually, I CAN believe that some Lotus developers could come up with that. But they wouldn't get approval to spend the money needed to develop or market it, nor should they.
Why?
a) It would never make enough to justify the expense
b) nobody in the sales organization woudl pay attention to it, it's too "small", neat and cool though it is
c) This is what our ISV community is FOR!
We (actually, I can really only speak for myself) LOVE our ISVs! They make our products better. They bring more customers (and more KINDS of customers) to our products than we could ever do ourselves.
A robust partner/ISV community is a major indication of the health of the products around which they cluster. Anyone (inside IBM or out) who doesn't believe that is, well, wrong.
I've recently been involved in helping out the IBM team supporting a big ISV, uh, er, yes, a big one, um, outside the U.S., let's just leave it at that. If they "win" (ship a version of their product integrated with Hannover, and OH BY THE WAY, in their solution, the end-user never SEES Hannover, or an IBM logo anywhere -- and WE DON'T CARE!), then IBM wins too, we sell thousands more NEW seats that we could NEVER have marketed to directly, ever.
Isn't that good?
Comment posted by Nathan T. Freeman07/14/2007 05:13:27 PM
Homepage: http://nathan.lotus911.com
Bob, it's not my conjecture that IBM needs to develop a Gantt chart hack. It's that IBM doesn't exploit the interface capabilities of Notes in its core templates, and that's why we hear Eclipse developers claim that a 5-frame interface requires composite applications to build.
"Justify the expense of development?" That took under a day, man!
And if sales can brag about ghosted calendar entries (and they do) then certainly they would brag about a calendar view being able to show cross-day detail for multiple individuals as a Gantt chart.
I agree that a robust ISV market is a major indication of the health of a product. Do you think that Domino has one? I don't. And I perceived Alan's question as "will the new Eclipse wrapped Notes 8 get us one?" Perhaps I'm taking it the wrong way.
Anyway, I know you and I largely agree on the importance of an ISV community and how IBM can best service it. My perception of your entire JOB is to service it! And my point to Alan's question was: I don't know whether the "let's harvest Eclipse developers" strategy is going to be the killer one.
Let me put it another way -- I think IBM building the kind of WOJO-enablement that we've discussed would go WAY, WAY further towards building a healthy ISV community than composite apps ever will.
And yes, I'd be happy to be proven wrong.
I was, after all, the guy that designed and gave away shirts that say "Save the client. Save the world." I think it's pretty transparent where my loyalties lie.
Comment posted by Patrick Corey07/15/2007 01:37:58 AM
Homepage: http://www.dangsite.com/blog
Well I can see there are many opportunities in the ISVs market space. A lot of the development seems to not always bring something into the Lotus space that is not as expected. I do see a lot of vendors trying to bring their content into the Lotus space, but it does not foster the existing Lotus client. To wit, the ISVs build a new application because there are not as many open interfaces to use within Lotus client or replicate their data models to the NSFs space.
I have always been looking how to "integration" the Lotus client or the data from the NSF space into other applications. Right now I miss what Lotus used to do in the pre-IBM days. There was a 3rd party magazine which catalog the other solutions that use Lotus Notes. Today I think it is hard for a new Lotus customer to find those solutions. In fact much of IBM Partnerworld does not make it simple to register the ISVs project into that space. Instead those ISVs use their market resources. IBM seems to not focused on the Lotus client unless there is a group (with enough influcence) to attract attention. For example, I got to speak at the IBM Legal Council conference and how some solutions for the Lotus client. But guess how many times I was asked about SOA applications for Lotus and Websphere -- 5 times. Those customer in the conference were not looking for SOA. They wanted to have any application that their user base can use as these users are in Lotus Notes all day. Can IBM get anything right? SOA is nice, but if the desktop today can be built on powerful hardware, why limit the user experience. Can you get drag and drop via SOA?
Not to negative to OpenNTF, it has no business model and it is doing as well as the Open Source world would try to marry an application to the Linux desktop. Unless you are aware of this space, it is very much overlooked. Many companies want support and OpenNTF has many dormant projects. Back in 2003/2004 I was wanting to help OpenNTF, but when a few project leads do not respond to an email (even after a few months), it gives a good clue that the project is dead (or a dud). While there are good projects, I don't think there is any practical use for any business to adopt.
If I review the 30 Lotus customers I interact, not one is using any OpenNTF templates in their environments. Not to surprising this is as similar experience as to using other relational databases such as Postgres or MySQL in those same worlds to replace Mircosoft SQL Server or Oracle or even IBM DB2. In other words these "non corporate" softwares seem servicing those small/medium companies that don't mind using softwares that do not have formeral support. In fact those corporations have a good, talent developer base to service their own environment with projects that are worthy to their "business world".
Guess that is enough ranting...
Comment posted by Axel Janssen07/15/2007 01:59:11 AM
Often those existing apps create there own dependencies, which might cause problems for the project to be developed inhouse.
I have seen it different times when working for ISVs that the "product" was developed years ago and its quite hard to adapt to changes as nobody in the organization really knows every detail about its inner working. Its very easy to blame inhouse developers for creating their own stuff. Sometimes they do it to not get into a situation, where they should integrate platform xy, it would be easy with product x but prohibitivedly hard with the bought product. They may request the vendor to make the change, but then the maintainance, adoption costs are just transfered to the vendor. ISVs break business-wise because of maintainance costs.
Comparing with the Java world they have all those frameworks, toolsets, design patterns and stuff. You may say they need it, because their platform so "complicated". But it also serves as a sound basis for applications more easy to adapt to change.
I am all for downward compatibility, but its not without costs. To solve a problem in Lotus Domino you now have a lot of different approaches. And this "rip-and-replace" may have also some benefits. It can make the platform easier to use by concentrating on todays best practices.
Eclipse developers have to be actracted as they don't have to work for Expeditor. One can complain about those nerdy eclipse developers for a lack of interest to proactivedly offer openSource stuff on top of expeditor for the notes community. I doubt that this will take us any further. If we don't want to become Eclipse developers ourselves we have to atract them.
I can't understand the debate about if openNTF is good or bad for ISVs. OpenNTF is there. They may even profitize from it. If an ISV with professional project management, marketing and stuff can't compete with solutions which are often developed in the free time of developers, there is no need for the existence of such ISV.
Comment posted by Ben Poole07/15/2007 01:01:31 PM
Homepage: http://benpoole.com
Maybe I'm just being naive. But with my minimal experience of a few ISV-branded applications, it's pretty bloody obvious why there isn't a burgeoning ISV ecosystem around Lotus Notes client applications■
They suck.
Sure there's marketing, there's buzz, there's technical quality: all these things are crucial.
But Gordon Bennett, it's not brain science: if you don't sell something that looks good, and that people want, you will SINK. FiRM is an example of a company doing the product right. I cannot count how may examples there are of the opposite.
Comment posted by Carl Tyler07/15/2007 01:34:42 PM
Homepage: http://www.iminstant.com
One thing that can be very hard as an ISV is competiting with the supplier. Take for example Instant, who offers solutions for Sametime. For 5 years Instant has offered integration between Sametime and Microsoft, it did this at a time when IBM had pretty much given up on Sametime, and in some ways, helped keep Sametime alive in competitive accounts. Now IBM kills that revenue stream for Instant by offering their own integration, then this year Instant finds out that IBM will be offering persistent chatrooms for Sametime, also a product that Instant has offered for a number of years for Sametime.
Now I want to point out that this is no different to any other ISV supplier relationship, but it does make a company leader look twice at entering a market as an ISV, as if you get a good feature idea etc. then most likely the supplier is going to copy it, and then as an ISV you need find the small niche play, which the supplier won't enter into and then you have to calculate as to whether or not it is worthwhile.
Comment posted by Alan Lepofsky07/15/2007 02:49:10 PM
Homepage: http://www.alanlepofsky.net
Carl, you're absolutely right, that relationship is a hard one. For us (Lotus) we have to balance what the customer expects from us (free) "out of the box" vs. which areas we leave to the ISV community. This comes up often with System Administration features as well as end user features. I don't have the magic formula to say where the line is, but I hope we walk it properly most of the time.
Comment posted by Ben Langhinrichs07/16/2007 01:17:43 PM
Homepage: http://www.GeniiSoft.com/showcase.nsf/GeniiBlog
Alan - I think IBM usually walks the line properly in terms of what it provides, but there have been promises made at various public conferences, such as Lotusphere, over the years that IBM will communicate in advance with ISVs to prevent surprises of this sort. IBM has not always walked this line as well. Communication with the ISVs who support your products would help encourage their continued loyalty. Carl's example points out that this communication could at least give an ISV a chance to shift gears, even if IBM is going to compete. Granted, I have only been mildly effected over the years, but if I had known that IBM was NOT going to compete in some areas, I might have moved more actively into them. Not having any advance notice of such moves means that a calculation has to be made without sufficient information. That can lead to a situation where neither IBM not the ISV provides a certain functionality, which can then hurt a customer.
I guess I wish that IBM could develop better communication channels that do not depend so heavily on individual relationships.
Comment posted by Gail Shlansky07/17/2007 07:28:19 AM
Homepage: http://www.axceler.com
Well, speaking from the perspective of one of those successful Tools vendors
(Axceler, formerly Percussion), I can say we've always been intrigued yet
frustrated by the Packaged Applications opportunity. There seems to be
plenty of demand, but customers also want lots of customizations. This
makes it very expensive to support the applications once deployed and
difficult to manage application upgrades.
Many years back we looked at expanding into the applications market via
acquisition. But as we looked at the target company, we saw they had to
maintain a separate application instance in house for each and every
customer they ever sold! Managing that required alot of overhead.
You can solve that a bit through componetization and configuration, but the
more you componetize the application, the more your product starts to
evolve to just a really big development library (remember IT Factory?)
That still might be a neat product, but it's no longer a packaged application.
Except for a few very narrow cases, like Domino.doc, Lotus never got
much past the "nifty fifty." So the real question is, what kinds of
applications on Notes/Domino are best suited for productization?
Comment posted by Nathan T. Freeman07/17/2007 12:51:52 PM
Homepage: http://nathan.lotus911.com
Gail, I think that perspective might be a result of the sort of lock-step dev style that a lot of Notes developers get into. If you're building a 3-pane UI with forms that have Name, Address and Phone number, and views that have Name, Address and Phone number, then yeah, customization is really difficult.
On the other hand, if you approach your initial dev model in anticipation of flexibility, there's an awful lot you can do. In my experience, anyway.
