IBM Beefs Up Workplace Initiative

The new Workplace application components, promised to ship in the second quarter, expand on Lotus' previously announced plans to embrace rich client functionality.

IBM Software General Manager Steve Mills said Workplace, which allows for the componentization and reuse of legacy applications in what IBM says is a secure environment, is a way to extend service-oriented architectures (SOAs).

"This makes it clear that regardless of how thick or thin, all applications are first-class citizens of SOAs," Mills said.

Judith Hurwitz, president of Hurwitz Associates, a Wellesley, Mass.-based consultancy, concurred. "People are starting to build these SOAs and have all sorts of different services, [and] they want to know where to put all the pieces. Here's the answer--an uber-container," she said.

Many observers see the Workplace push as a revived attempt by IBM to contain and perhaps reverse Microsoft's momentum on the desktop in the pre-Longhorn era.

This is hardly IBM's first attempt to devalue the Windows/Office dynamic desktop duo. More than a year ago, the company started offering application "editors" served up from the WebSphere Portal Server. These lightweight applications offered a percentage of the functionality found in Microsoft Office, but IBM salespeople pitched the functionality as a "freebie" that enterprise accounts could use to negotiate better volume licensing deals on Microsoft Office.

Mills and other IBM executives insist that their strategy is not based on Microsoft envy. "This is not an anti-Microsoft move, it's about customer choice," Mills told reporters Monday morning in New York. Still, many aren't buying that message. "Look," said one longtime IBM watcher. "IBM has to be very careful what it says. It makes a lot of money on Windows implementations."

"This is the first serious alternative to a PC-centric Office," said Amy Wohl, president of Wohl Associates, Narberth, Pa. "This is coming from a major vendor being offered as part of a complete infrastructure strategy. Lots of people will give this a look."

The difference now is that these Workplace editors are rich, fuller-function clients, not lightweight browser based offerings, said Ken Bisconti, vice president of messaging products at Lotus.

A Microsoft executive said IBM remains both a competitor and partner. "It all comes down to one question: Do you need a rich desktop client or less functional portal-based solution?," said Dan Leach, group product manager of Microsoft Office Systems. "Our vision is to put the power at your fingertips. IBM still believes that the power of the software should be held at arm's length."

"To me this looks like an extension of strategy to convince customers to use IBM middleware, IBM servers, and IBM services," he noted.

IBM's plan is to offer an insulating middleware layer between popular client operating systems and server-managed and provisioned applications. Of course, the provisioning is offered by the IBM Workplace server.

IBM is also putting a lot of capability on the desktop, including the Java-based Cloudscape database and a subset of the app server, raising some concerns about performance. Lotus General Manager Ambuj Goyal said he is running early Workplace code on his Windows XP machine but admitted that "this is all a journey. What is the hardware requirement for Longhorn?"

The Workplace clients will run on Linux, Windows and, eventually, Macintosh clients. IBM-supplied plug-ins would let customers with Office run those applications within Workplace as well. The advantage, IBM executives said, is that documents saved would be automatically replicated back to secure servers and maintained there.

The price of the Workplace provisioning server is $2 per user, per month. The messaging and document components are $1 per user, per month each in volume quantities.

The IBM Workplace Client Micro Edition 5.7, due in the third quarter, will support more than 20 operating systems and five processors that together cover about 90 percent of the device market, said Gary Cohen, general manager of IBM's Pervasive Computing group. The update adds support for embedded Linux and SWT extensions as well as user interface tools to help developers work on target LCD devices.

As previously reported by CRN, IBM Workplace Client Micro Edition 5.7 shrinks down important components of IBM's application server, database and other IBM middleware for use in handheld devices.

This story was updated to include Microsoft comments.