Lotus Gets Back To Its Roots

While much of the Lotus-Microsoft competition revolves around Lotus Notes/Domino vs. Microsoft's Exchange software, Lotus clearly wants to expand the battlefront with its other products, including Sametime, the Connections social networking application, the Quickr collaboration software and the free Symphony desktop productivity suite Lotus debuted last year.

Upgrades for nearly all the products, slated for debut throughout this year, were detailed at Lotusphere.

"With the [product] portfolio we have right now, plus the announcement of Foundations, you have probably one of the richest portfolios in decades," said Robert Wong, Lotus director of worldwide SMB, channels and SaaS sales, speaking to Lotus channel partners on the first day of Lotusphere.

But while he said sales of Lotus products through the channel are growing faster than direct sales, he exhorted channel partners to expand their sales efforts beyond Lotus Notes/Domino to the rest of the Lotus product line. "You need to move out of your comfort zone," he said. "Learn to link value across the product portfolio."

Some get the synergy. "There's now a nice, cohesive integration between their products," says Alphalogix's McCandless. His company does a lot of work with the Lotus WebSphere Portal and he sees ways to extend the value of his customers' portals by creating social networks based on Connections and Quickr.

Wong also pitched channel partners on providing hosted versions of Lotus products, arguing that they provide a recurring revenue stream that is more profitable over the long term than installing on-premise applications. And Lotus will rely on the channel to sell the Bluehouse SaaS apps, which will include on-demand collaboration and communications applications, to companies with fewer than 500 employees.

Channel Push

Lotus is adding more incentives for channel partners to make all this more attractive. One is a $3,000 credit VARs earn by using the IBM Sales Connections Web site to help close deals: The credit can be applied to telemarketing, trade show and sales pipeline-generation expenses, Kounadis said. Under the GameOn promotion resellers can earn a 25 percent rebate for providing products and services to convert Outlook/Exchange customers to Lotus.

Alphalogix's McCandless is particularly jazzed about IBM's Web-page syndication effort that lets channel partners project pages from Lotus' Web site, such as those with product specifications, onto their own Web sites. McCandless says that will save his company a lot of Web page redevelopment work.

As it turns its attention more toward the SMB market, Lotus expects to learn a lot from the 2,600 channel partners the company is acquiring through the Nitix buyout. Those solution providers generally sell to smaller companies than Lotus' current channel partners. "These guys are going to bring a lot to the table," Rhodin said.

Lotus is changing, branching beyond Notes/Domino into broader areas such as collaboration and social networking, and into new technologies like SaaS applications. The question is not only whether Lotus can do this successfully, but whether its base of channel partners also can change along with the company.

Said Rhodin: "The models of computing are evolving and the models for selling through channel partners is evolving as well."