Lotus Seeks New Channel Chief After Bisconti Takes New Role

Lotus

Bisconti, a six-year veteran with Lotus, now IBM's Lotus Software group, will retain his current partner duties until a replacement is tapped, a Lotus spokeswoman said.

Since IBM acquired Lotus in 1995, it has struggled to merge the Lotus Business Partner and IBM Best Team partner programs, although that consolidation is nearly complete now.

Bisconti was named vice president of the Lotus Worldwide Business Partner organization at Lotusphere in January 2000.

The organizational transition comes at a time when Lotus is also trying to explain its technology road map,and how much of it will come from IBM rather than Lotus,to partners and customers.

Last week, at IBM's developerWorks show, Lotus executives tried to reassure partners that the company would fulfill promises to provide JSP support in Domino 6, due in the third quarter. Since Lotusphere in January, Lotus has said it will offer JSP support based on IBM's WebSphere line, but has not disclosed any information on how that support will be provided.

At Lotusphere, the company shocked attendees by pulling its own home-grown JSP support from Domino 6 in favor of a version provided by WebSphere. Partners fear that IBM will charge for a Domino-WebSphere bundle for JSP capabilities that had been promised as part of Domino.

Last week, there were still no details. Jeanette Horan, vice president of worldwide development and support, said Lotus will provide JSP tabs in Domino 6 "to make it easier to build apps to bridge to JSP engines ... and we're looking to a partnership with our WebSphere colleagues for providing the actual engine."

Horan also reiterated Lotus' promise that current Domino developers, who love that development environment, will not be left out in the cold in IBM's move to the J2EE architecture.

"We have so many Domino developers today that love the platform and want to keep using it, so we plan to keep evolving it and allowing it to participate in hybrid application environments," Horan said.

Meanwhile, companies are seizing the opportunity and jumping into the void. ToJava, a Silicon Valley start-up, is offering tools to migrate Notes/Domino applications to a J2EE application server, the company said.