Zollar: Indeed--we have a client for Pocket PC. We've announced it. It's called Mobile Notes. The platforms that we support in the mobile and wireless space--which we think is critical for client access capability into the Domino infrastructure--are Pocket PC and Palm. We don't build the code directly, but we work very closely with Research in Motion on the BlackBerry device. We also support the Epoch environments, so that gives us support for Nokia and Ericsson devices. We announced support for Nokia's 9210 communicator a few months back. So, when you step back and look at the devices we support--they represent 90 percent of the handheld devices. That's our strategy. And, of course, we work with the network operators so that we have support through the wireless networks.

Tech Update: In sizing up Lotus vs. Microsoft, it's really difficult to find market share numbers that Microsoft and Lotus won't dispute. But, what's your official position on number of seats today?

Zollar: We go by what IDC reports. IDC has reported us as holding--in their July 2001 report--the number-one position--with 39 percent share of seats, and 50 percent of the revenue share. We're pleased with that. We also have our own internal numbers, but we don't play the game of releasing our total numbers any more. This is because we've moved on to focusing more on our customers' priorities--total cost of ownership, return on investment--and demonstrating value with things like our Knowledge Discovery Servers, which is an exciting new product line for us that can really help with that information overload problem. It brings the power of the Google search algorithms to the enterprise--with enterprise searching capabilities that not only apply to documents, but also to people's expertise. This notion of locating experts is an important part. We connect that into the SameTime instant messaging technology, and now you have the ability to search for, and immediately connect to the best expert in your organization on any given topic.

Tech Update: Back to the numbers game. If I took the worst numbers that I could find for Microsoft's share and the best ones that I could find for Lotus, skewing this as best as I possibly could into Lotus' direction--the growth trend still favors Microsoft. Can that trend be reversed? And, if so, what role will Rnext play in that?

Zollar: You have to look at where we have our share advantage. Our share advantage over Microsoft tends to get larger in two major dimensions: First, in organizations over 5,000 employees and second, outside of the United States. Now, the first is actually quite logical because we have always differentiated our messaging offering with collaboration features. The bigger organizations get, the more they value collaboration. It's why companies like Exxon-Mobil, after a shoot-out, picked Notes and Dominoe as a standard--throwing out their Exchange environment. Outside the United States, we have also just been really effective in executing. Microsoft did not execute as well in the early days outside the United States as they are now. That gave us an advantage. We've taken large share positions in places like China and Europe and Japan. So I think that those are the two key factors.

I think, in general, the small-to-medium businesses have been in an area where Microsoft has had strength across their product line. We focused on enterprises that have dimensions of complexity. So, if you've got a lot of organizations (in terms of business units, five thousand or more people), and geographic distribution, [your issues revolve] around communications and collaboration and getting people to work together. We put far more features into our product to address that market set than Microsoft has. A great example of that are some of the fine-grained security controls that we've got--things like execution control lists, in addition to access control lists. The idea is being able to deal with executable code and knowing where that executable code comes from as a way to help keep viruses and other invasions out. These are the kinds of things that have been a part of our differentiation. And, it is part of what we feature with our customer set.

Tech Update: Speaking of viruses and worms and all of that...as an ex-Lotus Notes user, one of the things that I enjoyed was that 99 percent of these things that came into my system couldn't affect it, because the code couldn't run in the Notes environment, like it can in the Outlook environment. Could somebody who wanted to target Notes actually be successful? In the wake of all the security problems, how much have you prioritized that type of security?

Zollar: Good question. We have put priority on building features like the execution control-list feature into our product set. Look, I would never say that hackers can't attack any environment that they're determined to attack. There are certainly a lot of people trying to do a lot of malicious things out there. But, I think, it is true that if you talk to our customers, they do want the different experience. Maybe some of it is targeting, but there's certainly a part of it that represents the feature set that's in the product.

See: Zollar unplugged: Part 2

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