Tech Update: When it ships, what will be Rnext's biggest enhancements over its predecessors?
Zollar: Oh, it's got lots of capabilities. Not the least of which is this whole focus on total cost of ownership. As I've said, most companies have established an infrastructure around messaging and collaboration. And most of them have picked us. A few have picked something else [Editor's note: Reference to Microsoft Exchange]. But, for the ones who have picked us, we certainly hear from them that now that they've got this in place, they want to improve the total cost of ownership and improve the quality of service delivery and scalability. Improve integration with systems management capability such as those from Tivoli that allow us to keep up the quality of service delivery. Getting our customers to five nines availability [Editor's note: Five-nines, or 99.999% availability is a reference to near perfect uptime]. Consistently, we have customers who are achieving that. We want to be able to provide the services and capability that really allow all of our customers to achieve that--as well as things like greatly improved replication. (Something Microsoft still hasn't figured out.) The ability to use less bandwidth with some nice compression algorithms. Being able to give people more fine-grained control over replication: what you replicate from, the size of the permitted replica, how replicatable documents deal with attachments (that drives all of us crazy). Those are some of the things that Rnext will feature.
Tech Update: When Release 5 came out, Lotus had some challenges getting companies to upgrade to it. Some estimates showed that by the middle of last year--roughly half of the Release 4 shops had upgraded. What percentage of your customers are still on Release 4?
Zollar: We think about 60 percent of our installed base [is on Release 5], and about 80 percent when you look at the server. That, as you know, is a pretty good result. We had a problem: that release was timed with this little event called Y2K. So a lot of our company missed a lot of our customer's Y2K windows. It was a slower ramp than we have seen in the past. But if I look at the number of customers who've [upgraded from Exchange 5.5] to Exchange 2000 in the time that it's been out--we are well ahead of their deployment rate with Release 5. So again, as infrastructures become more mission critical, and part of the fabric, it will take customers longer to make changes to new releases. And that's one of the reasons that we're not shipping new releases every six months, or every year.
Tech Update: What will Lotus do differently to lure its customer base more rapidly to Rnext, and will there be a direct upgrade path from Release 4 to Rnext?
Zollar: Yes, Release 4 will be protected in the upgrade path. We'll be doing lots more things than we did before [including] the ability to have better client deployment options. The client deployment piece has usually been the thing that's slowed our customers down. Having more migration scenarios supported--so it is not just R-4--but it is the specific maintenance level on R-4 that works with the specific maintenance levels of R-5, and Rnext. We have more of those permutations and combinations supported in this roll-out, which, I think, will be of great assistance to our customers. That will allow them to migrate in a way that's more natural, as opposed to having forced options or limited options.
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