Tech Update: I just want to circle back to something you said earlier--that a year from now, we were going to see some significant improvements to the way collaboration is embedded as a feature. Did I miss an announcement?
Mills: Well the portfolio continues to evolve. We have matured and added significant features to technologies like WebSphere and DB2 that provide us with an opportunity to further connect the Tivoli technologies. Some elements of Tivoli will now come over to the WebSphere infrastructure for better integration of the tooling. And in 2003, we'll be delivering a revamped version of Notes, which in fact builds on top of WebSphere and uses some of the native XML services of DB2 to provide a more scalable, flexible, and open collaboration environment than the Notes business we have today.
So we're reaching that point, as you do with all technologies, where you have to go through a major renovation. You typically invent something and you do incremental modifications to it. Sometimes you can evolve it very seamlessly, and in other cases, you reach a juncture where you realize you've got to make some deeper underlying changes.
Tech Update: So, does this come after Release 6, which is due later this year?
changes.
Tech Update: So, does this come after Release 6, which is due later this year?
Mills: After this year's R6 deliverable, the next version will be a WebSphere-based version. Notes is 80 percent middleware today. It already has some WebSphere and pieces of DB2 embedded in it today. But it's fundamentally built on the Notes file system, which is a late '80s design point.
Tech Update: So you're replacing the whole underlying data store?
Mills: Throwing out the whole infrastructure and revamping the data storage. We have flexible schema-mapping capability in DB2 today, so we can map the Notes file systems and we can map XML natively. You can use alternative syntax like XML to actually access the data that sits in DB2 today. So that capability in DB2 now is allowing us to pull out the old Notes file structure and insert the DB2 infrastructure.
Tech Update: And you can put in a whole Web services interface on top of any discrete collection of data or embedded procedure?
Mills: Right. Almost all commercial applications today use an underlying relational store. And the Notes file system is not an easy thing to integrate into those applications. Once we get on to DB2, we'll have a much easier time making seamless collaboration work effectively around existing applications, so I can more easily apply collaboration.
As [Lotus General Manager] Al [Zollar] pointed out, collaboration is not an application. It's a feature of all your applications--CRM, procurement, ERP, HRMS, etc. The collaborative infrastructure behind that feature remains invisible.
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