Zollar Challenges Microsoft In Bid To Keep Accenture Business

Lotus Development CEO Al Zollar challenged rival Microsoft to a head-to-head product-benchmark challenge as his company fights to keep tens of thousands of Notes seats at integration giant Accenture.

"Microsoft is not about collaboration," Zollar said Wednesday morning in a Q&A session before hundreds of Notes administrators at the Admin 2001 conference here.

"I will benchmark against them with any collaborative application you want me to. . . . Do an application benchmark, we will beat them every time," Zollar said.

He was responding to a question about Accenture moving from Lotus Notes/Domino to Microsoft Exchange for its e-mail and groupware.

Clearly, a move from one mail package to another could be huge for either vendor--Accenture, formerly Andersen Consulting, employs more than 70,000 people in 46 countries, according to spokeswoman Roxanne Taylor in New York.

"I am not aware of any change in our e-mail system," Taylor said. But other Accenture insiders said all Notes development at the firm has been stopped. Microsoft and Accenture joined forces last year to form Avanade, a separate company dedicated to application programming and development using Microsoft technologies.

Similar situations have cropped up before. A scuffle erupted at EDS years ago, when Lotus sources alleged that Microsoft was pressuring the huge integrator to drop Notes for Exchange. EDS, Plano, Texas, had a huge enterprise agreement with Microsoft and is a large service provider partner. EDS was also perplexed because Cambridge, Mass.-based Lotus, one of its primary suppliers, had been purchased by IBM, which fielded its own huge integration arm that competed directly with EDS.

But, many observers say, despite heated competition from Microsoft, Lotus Domino, which is going into its sixth major release, has been around longer than Exchange and still scales better and offers more functionality.

"I will take that [Exchange vs. Notes] challenge any day," Zollar said, adding he is personally "engaged" in discussions to keep Accenture as a key corporate customer.

Zollar implied that as part of the Avanade deal, Microsoft is pressuring Accenture to move to its own technologies internally. "Microsoft has a lot of ways to compete, so if they do a billion-dollar joint venture with Accenture, they've got to say to people, 'Gee, you should really use our technology.' They [Microsoft] don't necessarily compete on the basis of who can create the most value," he said.

Zollar acknowledged that he and Lotus cannot force the issue. "I've been involved in these discussions. I can't make them do anything. They will decide to do what they need to do, but you can be assured I am pointing out to them . . . the switching costs of going to technology that not only is inferior but is restricted to the Wintel architecture road map--it can't work on anything else. And by the way, it's got several parts that are dead-ended."

Lotus, now part of IBM, will not take such threats lying down, Zollar said. The company is going after Microsoft's installed base as well. In one huge Exchange account, it took one customer 20 days to send a message to every one of its 300,000 employees, he said.

"If you think that is best for Accenture, God bless you, make that decision," said Zollar.

He vowed to improve support for Notes administrators. In response to a question about such support--which drew thunderous applause--Zollar said the company is prioritizing such support. Lotus' response rate is not in the desired range of seven days from initial contact for resolving a critical problem, he said. But senior management is intensively focused on making improvements, he said.

Lotus posted the first public beta of RNext, the next release of Notes and Domino, on Tuesday. It will roll out in wider beta in the second half, Zollar said. The next release promises improved calendaring and scheduling, replication and scalability.

Neither Microsoft nor Avanade returned repeated phone calls for this story.