Daniele Vistalli's Blog

Here we are. On monday Lotus Foundations will be officially launched in italy.

Due to this, and to the fact I work for a VAD (value added distributor), I've been lucky enough to be invited at IBM on tuesday and wednesday this week to follow the partner enablement.

I won't go deep in the technology thing, which is out of doubt revolutionary, I'll do this later next week after the product has been officially launched.

But I want to tell you about two people I've met there and taught me a lot.


The small business Vision

Let's introduce Ozzy Papic (a name you've better to learn), founder and CEO of Net Integration Technologies, the company that created the Nitix technology and that IBM acquired to create the Lotus Foundations family.

Ozzy is brilliant and got to be appointed with a wolrdwide IBM role for "SMALL BUSINESS", yes SMALL BUSINESS not SMALL AND MEDIUM BUSINESS. He seems to be proud and happy about this achievement.
For sure this is a shift at IBM where small is 2000 people while in the real world small business can be as small as one person.

Personally this seems to be a huge opening in the IBM way of thinking. The big IBM is still there, there's no shift BUT now there's somebody with the right experience and understanding of how the real small business works.

He presented Lotus Foundation for what it really is: "an answer to the needs of small companies that want the same technology and services of the enterprise" with a different ultra-packed approach that embeds administrative intelligence into the software itself preventing mistakes and ensuring everything simply works (try doing this with Microsoft SBS).

Another great point is the fact that Lotus Foundations Start 1.0 is not a 1.0 release really. The Nitix technology has been around for years now (should be since 1999) and got better at every iteration (we should be now using the fifth or sixth generation of Nitix) in terms of functionality, security and simplicity.

As said I'll tell more after the monday launch. There's no NDA about what I learned but I want to keep some surprises for later.

For sure we're going to have a lot of fun when we address smaller customers that up to today had no real choice but to go Microsoft.


Let's get technical

The second day I participated in a all-day full-immersion technical discussion and dissection of Lotus Foundation. The host is now Allen Reid (another name to keep at hand), he has been working at Net Integration for the last four years and he's the head of Technical Support. He knows Foundations in depth so I was ready to squeeze knowledge out of him :)

Allen is a very good guy and was patient enough to answer to the ton of question I had. Before the event I've been experimenting/studying foundations 1.0 for 3 weeks and I expected to be almost "informed" abouth what foundations does. I couldn't be more wrong.

As Allen began explaining some of the advanced features, like IDB (intelligent disk backup), the nitix core and so on I realized two things:

1. I've never seen something so smart and so packed
2. This is going to be a killer app

Another thing you must carve into your mind:

Lotus Foundations is NOT A LINUX SERVER
Lotus Foundations is NOT A DOMINO SERVER

It contains both servers but they serve to obtain a common objective: to provide the users a stable, simple, secure environment to do their work without thinking about the technology.

I'll tell more in the next posts and I can tell that Domino Admins will be somehow disappointed at first, then when you get the reasons and the rationale behind it.. You'll love it... granted.

Allen told me he wasn't used to be a "star" before Net Integration got to Lotus/IBM and nobody ever blogged about him. His first encounter with the community was after a "support call" with Chris Miller. You may imagine what happened... in a couple of seconds Chris was twittering about it ...
Allen was surprised... well, Allen. This is how it works in the Domino community, welcome.

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Daniele Vistalli July 10th, 2008 20:18:04