Hi Gator,
The release today by IBM is a bombshell. Further to it read the following FAQ on SAMETIMEfrom Lotus. All Sideware shareholders should read the following carefully:
ghunk
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Frequently Asked Questions
What announcements has Lotus made regarding its Sametime strategy?
Two things: The acquisition of Databeam and Ubique and our overall Sametime product strategy. Ubique brings advanced real-time people and place-based awareness as well as conversation tools - such as chat and instant messaging. DataBeam provides products, technology and leadership in the data and computer telephony conferencing market. Through these acquisitions, Lotus is taking a significant step forward towards the fulfillment of its Sametime product strategy. Lotus plans, with the help of the development teams at both companies, to integrate these technologies into a family of Lotus-branded, client- and server-based solutions that deliver the benefits of network-based, real-time communication and collaboration to our worldwide customers. We're taking technologies that have been widely used on the Internet and turning them into "fit-for-business" solutions that will change how companies conduct on-line interaction throughout their organizations.
Why has Lotus acquired Ubique?
Ubique and Lotus share the same vision of a blended asynchronous (e.g., e-mail and discussion databases) and synchronous (e.g., real time chat, instant messaging) collaborative solutions for customers. The people at Ubique are experienced, motivated, and innovative. Their vision and ability to execute on that vision make the employees of Ubique an important asset for Lotus. Just as we share a similar vision, their technology complements our existing asynchronous groupware solution by providing real-time "awareness" and "conversation" tools. These applications include chat, buddy technology, instant messaging, and auditorium functions. And, their pace of innovation on their core platform continues to accelerate. This is truly an exceptional team of people with whom we are proud to now be associated.
Why has Lotus acquired Databeam?
Lotus found with DataBeam, just as we did with Ubique, that we shared much of the same vision for collaboration. The people at DataBeam represent not only perhaps the leading group of experts in the ITU standards for data, audio, and video conferencing, but the people are also an exceptional engineering team. DataBeam is the industry leader in providing both T.120 and H.323 services in the form of product as well as technology licensing to other key industry vendors. T.120 is the international standard for application and data conferencing and H.323 is the international standard for audiovisual conferencing. Both data and audio and vidio conferencing are key elements to our overall Sametime strategy and DataBeam's products and technologies move us significantly closer to completing our Sametime vision.
What is Sametime?
Sametime is a family of products that realize Lotus' vision for the next generation of collaborative business applications. The Sametime family of products will include clients, servers, application development tools, solutions, and services. These offerings will enable the merging of real-time services into asynchronous environments with specific focus on awareness, conversation and object sharing tools. Sametime products will be designed to be deployed in both Domino and Non-Domino environments.
What are the benefits to customers?
The pace and competitive pressures for businesses are increasing every day. Companies have begun to realize that their workers need the ability to find colleagues on-line, rapidly schedule and conduct meetings, create team discussions, and share and exchange applications in real-time -- regardless of geographic boundaries. Lotus' plans for the Sametime family of products are designed to address those needs. The combination of Lotus' heritage in delivering collaboration and groupware solutions to business, our extensive knowledge of the needs of enterprise customers, coupled with the leading-edge capabilities provided by DataBeam and Ubique technology and employees all create an unparalleled level of expertise that will enable us to provide the most advanced real-time communications and collaboration solutions in the marketplace.
How does Sametime relate to Lotus' Knowledge Management efforts?
Knowledge management is about infrastructure, applications, tools and solutions that support creating, discovering and distributing knowledge. Much knowledge exists as "know-how" and expertise and is processed through collaboration. Sametime is critical technology to support these dynamic knowledge management processes. Lotus is committed to delivering products that support our customers' knowledge management requirements, and this commitment is a key part of our investment in Sametime. Sametime is also a critical ingredient in Lotus' Knowledge Management solutions with first application in the area of distance learning. We will work closely with our 18,000 business partners to extend their knowledge management solution offers with Sametime collaboration ingredients.
What is Awareness within the Sametime realm?
Awareness is knowing who is connected to the network ("buddy lists"), and potentially where they are in cyberspace. People use "awareness" today when they use a buddy list (as popularized by AOL), the "finger" command on the Internet, or commands like "QUERY userid" from older time sharing systems. This technology allows a user to tell who else is online at that moment, enabling the user to then initiate a network-enabled "conversation" (see Conversation Tools below) without regard to where they are geographically, what telephone number to use, or the network address of the computer they are currently using.
What are Conversation Tools within the Sametime realm?
In collaboration, "the medium is the message." Depending on the level or urgency, familiarity, intimacy, people will select the appropriate tool for interaction. Synchronous or real-time interaction has its own set of tools -- chat, telephone, video-conferencing -- that users will choose from depending on the task at hand. Chat is an important example of a synchronous conversation tool. The most useful conversation tool aside from in-person conversation is the telephone. People have voted with their wallets on this one. That is why Lotus, in addition to our continued interest in interfacing with existing telephone systems, has also invested in computer-based telephony is an important element in our portfolio of conversation tools.
What are Shared Objects?
Typically on-line conversations refer to some sort of business object, such as a document or a diagram: a sales proposal, budget forecast, map, product design, or marketing brochure. When some or all of the participants have shared access to that object, the conversation -- the collaboration -- is richer and more complete.
What is Instant Messaging ?
Instant Messaging (IM) typically refers to a synchronous text-based conversation between two users. In it's simplest form, IM is a textual page (note) which may appear on a person's screen from another user. IM systems have been popularized by AOL and others.
What are Buddy Lists?
Buddy Lists represent a list of users or groups which are defined by the user. This list is the used as the focal point for an awareness facility where users can learn the "state" of the requested user or group as being available or off-line. Buddy Lists have been popularized by products such as AOL Instant Messenger product.
What are the Ubique's and DataBeam's flagship products?
Ubique's technology and product capabilities include text chat, buddy lists (show who's on-line), instant messaging (allow short messages to be "flashed" between on-line originators and recipients), virtual auditorium (multi-user, moderated text chat), and "document-based awareness". Document-based awareness is the ability for a user to see who else online is working with the same document. An example of document-based awareness would be to inform a user browsing a particular web page of who else is viewing that same page. This would also provide the basis for inviting some or all of those people into a conversation (telephone, chat, IP audio, video, etc.) about the information on the page. Ubique is the only company known to offer document-based awareness today.
DataBeam provides support for the base protocols required for real-time applications in the conversation and shared object space. These protocols are T.120 for data conferencing H.323 for audiovisual conferencing. DataBeam has evolved from being an OEM supplier of these technologies to a suppler of applications that exploit these protocols. In fact, Microsoft licensed the T.120 protocols from DataBeam and the built NetMeeting on top of that protocol stack. However, Net Meeting is pure peer to peer - there is no server offering. This is a serious shortcoming. DataBeam offers a server product today that overcomes NetMeeting's peer-to-peer limitations by providing essential services for and communicating with Net Meeting clients as well as DataBeam's own client (T.120-based). Additionally, they offer a real time distance learning application. DataBeam has now added audiovisual support in the form of H.323 support via their Multimedia platform and H.323 toolkits. DataBeam is a recognized industry leader in real time standards and technology and is a founding member of the real time standards initiatives.
How do these announcements relate to Lotus' deal with AOL last November? Does Lotus still plan to integrate AOL Instant Messenger into Notes, Domino, eSuite and SmartSuite? Do you plan to use Ubique's technology instead?
The agreement announced with AOL in November is still in full force and effect. In fact, this transaction strengthens our partnership with AOL. The instant messaging capabilities implemented in Notes via the Ubique technology will also connect to the AOL' Instant Messenger (AIM service). This means that Notes users and AOL members will comprise one community; Notes users will be able to communicate in real time via instant messaging with AOL members and vice versa. By adding these instant messaging capabilities over 20 million Notes users can potentially communicate with over 20 million AOL members.
The Strategy
Will Lotus sell products resulting from these acquisitions directly or through channels?
Our initiative will only be successful if we are able to enable our partners to carry this technology into the marketplace and deliver the ROI to customers. As with all our products our sales strategy is channel-oriented.
Will Lotus maintain and honor existing channel agreements that these companies have in place?
The acquired companies will honor their commitment and relationships with industry partners.
How does this announcement impact Lotus' strategy for LearningSpace? Will these offerings be integrated?
These announcements accelerate the evolution of Lotus' strategy for LearningSpace. Customers are looking to offer both asynchronous and synchronous learning to their employees and students. The DataBeam Learning Server product and Ubique's Virtual Auditorium capability complement LearningSpace and the integration of the two products are key to our strategy of providing a complete platform for all distance learning needs of our corporate and academic customers.
The Products
What specific Sametime products is Lotus planning to ship?
Sametime is about continuing Lotus' innovative approach to groupware and offers a significant leap in the value of collaborative computing by blending synchronous and asynchronous capabilities. Lotus intends to ship a Sametime related server, clients, applications and application development products. At the core of the product family is a "Sametime" server which provides standalone community and meeting services, as well as integrates with existing Domino messaging, internet and application services. In addition, Lotus will provide a range of standalone and integrated clients that connect to the "Sametime" server to provide awareness, conversation and object-sharing capabilities. Finally, all of these new capabilities will be made available as components that will make it easy for partners or customers to build new applications or augment existing apps with this technology.
What tools will Lotus provide to application developers to promote the creation of custom Sametime applications?
Lotus will provide C/C++ and Java APIs and associated class libraries, as well as a full set of Java and Active/X components for Awareness, Conversation, and Shared Object services. In addition, Sametime-enabled templates will allow Lotus Business Partners, ISVs and corporate developers to build Sametime services and solutions into new and existing applications.
How do these acquisitions impact Lotus' competitive position in the market for groupware/collaboration and Web application server software?
Combining Ubique and DataBeam products and technologies with that of Notes/Domino gives our customers yet another class of Web applications unparalleled in the industry. Just as the emergence of the web catapulted the applications for Notes and Domino, we believe the blend of synch/asynch communications into fit for business solutions will further expand the penetration of groupware among businesses around the globe.
Lotus' development model for Sametime is geared toward providing maximum flexibility in the usage of Sametime products and technology through the support for popular development platforms (Active/X and Java). Using these familiar tools, developers can leverage Lotus' Sametime offerings to create interactive call center applications, help desk support systems that are truly responsive, and web sites that allow salespeople interact directly with their customers.
The Partnerships
How will Lotus' and IBM's Business Partners and Alliance partners be affected by these acquisitions?
We expect these acquisitions to be key in helping us lead our partners into a new area of opportunity. Synchronous collaboration is going to sweep the market. According to a recent Gartner Group estimate, the installed base of real time document sharing applications will increase from less than 200,000 in YE97 to at least 10 million by 2001. Partners working with Notes & Domino will be instrumental in helping our existing customer base of 22 million, as well as millions of new customers, to leverage these capabilities.
Will these products be available through your regular business and channel partners?
Product packaging has not yet been finalized, but resulting offering would be available through our regular business and channel partners.
Standards
Will Lotus remain committed to the standards that the acquired products support today as they move forward?
Absolutely. The interoperability that standards make possible is essential to our customers. Lotus' Sametime offerings are designed to provide standards-based compatibility and interoperability with other real-time products, such as Microsoft NetMeeting as well as networking and audio products and services coming to market from telecommunications and IP telephony companies.
On what standards are the companies' flagship products based?
DataBeam's conferencing technology is based on the T.120 standard, while its audio-visual conferencing products are based on H.323 technology. DataBeam has been a major force in the development of T.120 standards. The company's CTO has served three terms as president of the International Multi-media Teleconferencing Consortium (IMTC) and was head of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) real-time collaboration standardization effort. Ubique has actively participated in Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standards-setting processes for on-line presence and awareness.
What is the H.323 standard? Will Lotus support it?
The H.323 standard provides a foundation for audio, video, and data communications across IP based networks, including the Internet. By complying to H.323, multimedia products and applications from multiple vendors can interoperate, allowing users to communicate without concern for compatibility. H.323 is an umbrella recommendation from the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) that sets standards for multimedia communications over Local Area Networks (LANs) that do not provide a guaranteed Quality of Service (QoS). These networks dominate today's corporate desktops and include packet-switched TCP/IP and IPX over Ethernet, Fast Ethernet and Token Ring network technologies. Therefore, the H.323 standards are important building blocks for a broad new range of collaborative, LAN-based applications for multimedia communications. H.323 is currently supported by Lotus Sametime fully supports H.323
What is the T.120 standard? Will Lotus support it?
T.120 is the standard protocol for synchronously collaborating over network. T.120 actually defines more than a single standard, but encompasses a suite of standards; T.120 through and including T.128. Additionally, T.120 leverages another series of standards - the H.320 series of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) standards - for audio and video conferencing capabilities. Lotus' Sametime products fully supports T.120, paving the way for seamless interoperability with other T.120-compliant products. Furthermore, Lotus is working with the ITU and the other T.120 supporters to extend and improve the T.120 standard.
Will Lotus support IRC?
Lotus supports IRC chat clients in Domino 4.6 with a product called "Domino Chat", bundled with Domino. We will continue to support IRC in Sametime products. |
