Lotus Solves J2EE Conundrum By Offering Free WebSphere With Domino 6

Starting with Domino 6, slated to officially launch next week (see related story), customers will get a free copy of IBM's WebSphere application server, which will provide all of the J2EE support they need, said Ken Bisconti, vice president of messaging services for IBM's Lotus Software group.

"We will bundle WebSphere application server with Domino servers for use in WebSphere/Domino apps. It will be bundled free for Domino customers, and we will continue to evolve the WebSphere Application Toolkit, code-named Eclipse, to better support Domino as we continue to go forward," Bisconti told CRN.

Lotus had been working on its own J2EE support within Domino but pulled the code after one beta last year. That sparked fears that partners and customers would have to buy an additional product, WebSphere, to get access to all the capabilities Lotus had promised for Domino. Lotus executives said they pulled the code because it was nonstandard and they wanted to provide full and standard J2EE support.

A single-server version of WebSphere costs $8,000 per CPU and a multi-server version costs $12,000 per CPU.

While shipping a full additional application server for J2EE support struck some as overkill, Bisconti said most companies could run the two sets of software on the same physical server. "This is not much different from the direction we were going with embedded J2EE servers, but instead of a crippled implementation we'll have a full-function J2EE server with Websphere and the added benefit is we're giving it to customers as a way to get started," he said.

Lotus is also revamping its pricing model for Domino to put it more in line with IBM server pricing in a per-CPU model, Bisconti said. Details will be disclosed next Tuesday, he said. Currently, a range of Domino Servers are priced per server plus client licenses.

The current Domino 5.011 release, for example, is available as a plain e-mail server supporting one to four CPUs for $894 per server. The full app server, supporting custom application development and the same number of processors, is $2,300 per server. An enterprise server is $6,400, and a full-blown advanced server supporting nine or more CPUs now costs $25,000 to $26,000 per server. "We'll be collapsing all this down to a much simpler, more CPU-based model," Bisconti said.

Given all of those changes, it might be difficult to determine if Domino 6, which will add server-side spam controls and other perks, constitutes a price hike, industry observers said.

Lotus and Microsoft, after many years in the trenches, remain locked in a market-share battle for mail and messaging. Earlier this week Microsoft unveiled tools to migrate Domino applications to Microsoft back ends.

"The bottom line is these companies continue to leapfrog each other," said Joyce Graff, research director at Gartner.

Some solution providers lauded the aggressive move on Lotus' part. "This is an incredibly smart thing to do. Lotus' multiple-lane highway scenario says, 'Use Domino today, blend WebSphere when you're ready.' What better way to do that than to provide the WebSphere?" said David Via, vice president of business development at the Wolcott Group, Fairlawn, Ohio.

While solution providers speculated that Lotus must be bundling the proposed lower-end WebSphere Express, the bundle will, in fact, be of the full WebSphere server, Lotus said.

One of Lotus' big tasks is to somehow bring hundreds of Domino developers, who are used to their own tools, over into the more generic J2EE/Web services world without sacrificing their skill sets.

"There are two developer kits. One is Domino-centric but moving towards J2EE. The other is pure J2EE. We have to move these guys together," Bisconti said. "There's a whole Websphere contingent who know J2EE apps but don't know collaborative services," he said.

Going forward, the Domino JSP tag library will be added into the Eclipse toolkit, Bisconti added.