Vista and Lotus - Knowing when to let go of a brand

Microsoft spent an absolute fortune on the Vista brand. In marketing terms, the Vista campaign was huge by any standards, and was a big success insofar as raising awareness of Microsoft's next-generation Windows offering was concerned.

Of course as we all know, things didn't work out too well for Microsoft. The the new features and functionality of Vista turned out not to be as game-changing as Microsoft had implied in its messaging, and to make matters worse, the product wasn't really ready for mainstream use at the time it was launched. Initial expectations were therefore not met, leading to a significant backlash in the media, and ultimately among users. In the business context, many made the decision to defer upgrading because of the perceived risk and lack of incremental value, which is why XP is still the dominant version of Windows in corporate environments today.

The irony is that once Vista had settled down over the course of the first year or 18 months, it turned out to be a respectable operating system; certainly fit for purpose, and potentially offering some significant benefits, especially from an operations and risk management perspective in larger enterprises. But by then it was too late. Regardless of what was going on with the product, the Vista brand had accumulated too much negative baggage. And painful though it must have been, we have to give Microsoft credit for realising this, pressing the big red reset button, writing off its investment, and starting again under the Windows 7 banner - a tactic that seems to have paid off.

There is a lesson here, perhaps, for another vendor that has accumulated significant brand baggage that is getting in the way of customers appreciating the potential of a couple of its product lines. Back in the 90s, IBM lost the battle for dominance in the email and calendaring server arena with Lotus Notes and the back-end Domino server that drives it. For reasons that don’t matter now, Microsoft stole the market from under its nose. While IBM still argues the toss around market statistics, frequently trying to make the case that Lotus Notes/Domino is still as successful as Exchange, the following chart from our last Reg barometer study sums up the real situation.




















The data we are looking at here predominantly relates to respondents from the UK and USA. Based on this, IBM's footprint looks to be about half that of Microsoft in organisations with greater than 5,000 employees, dropping proportionally as we look to smaller entities. Significantly, however, whereas the commitment and sentiment associated with Microsoft Exchange is overwhelmingly positive, Lotus Notes/Domino is much more likely to be regarded as legacy. This is particularly noticeable in the corporate sector where almost half of respondents using the IBM solution put it into the legacy category.

To be fair, this picture is from almost a year ago, and though it hadn’t changed that much from the previous year (apart from the Lotus footprint shrinking a little), IBM has been doing some pretty good stuff recently. The latest Notes 8.5 release, for example, looks excellent, and if feedback from LotusSphere user group events is anything to go by, the response from the installed based has been very positive. In addition, a number of other offerings have recently emerged or been enhanced under the Lotus brand in hot areas such as social computing and unified communications, which provide some great options for Notes/Domino shops to extend their investments in a future proof manner. With this in mind, it’ll be interesting to see if we pick up any changes in commitment and perception when we run our next Barometer (watch this space).

In the meantime, there is a big question around whether Lotus offerings will make a significant impact outside of the Notes/Domino installed base, and the challenge here is not so much relevance and value in an absolute sense to a Microsoft Exchange shop, for example, but perceptions around the Lotus brand. There are two issues here, both stemming from the fact that the words ‘Lotus’ and ‘Notes’ have been tied together so strongly over time. The first is that as the latter acquired its legacy image in the broader market, that couldn’t help but rub off on the former.

Even if IBM is successful at refreshing the Lotus brand, however, and creating a more positive and up-to-date feel around it, there is still a second problem to contend with. This is that the same historical association between ‘Lotus’ and ‘Notes’ leads to the assumption that anything carrying the Lotus name is probably aimed at extending or enhancing the Notes/Domino environment. Given that Exchange shops generally have no appetite for considering a switch to the IBM alternative for core email and calendaring, the likelihood is therefore that they simply dismiss other Lotus branded offerings, such as unified communications and social computing solutions, as not being relevant to them.

Ironically, the latest ‘Lotus Knows’ marketing campaign (http://teblog.typepad.com/david_tebbutt/) runs the risk of actually aggravating the situation. While the fundamental idea of trying to create and propagate enthusiasm among end user influencers has merit, and there has reportedly been excitement within the ‘Lotus Loyal’ installed base, the whole thing revolves around the benefits of an end-to-end Lotus environment, with Notes/Domino featuring prominently. This simply reinforces the abovementioned assumptions and makes it even more likely that Exchange shops, 97% of which (according to our barometer data) indicate continued committed use, will totally ignore what IBM has on offer under the Lotus brand, even though it might prove useful to them.

Coming back to where we started, against this background, there is a strong argument for IBM grasping the nettle as Microsoft did with Vista, and either letting the Lotus brand go altogether or at least re-branding some of the newer stuff it has stuck under the Lotus banner. Admittedly, it’s not quite the same situation as Microsoft faced in that the Lotus brand is not tarnished in the same way as Vista; it’s more a case of the brand being entrenched in history and having become a bit tired over the years. Nevertheless, by burdening a lot of really cool software with so much historical baggage, IBM is not doing itself or the broader market any favours. The only party to benefit is arguably Microsoft, who will continue to pick up a lot of unified communications and social computing business in Exchange accounts by default, with an important set of alternatives from IBM not even being considered.

Getting to grips with consumerisation

There can be little doubt that the personal and domestic use of technology has had an impact on user expectations and behaviour with regard to the way IT is used in a business context.

This arguably started when the PC used at home typically became more up to date and of a higher spec than the equipment used in the workplace. The same has happened more recently with mobile devices, where extremely advanced technology is accessible to anyone in the high street making the standard issue corporate mobile look pretty lame in comparison.

Then we have the advent of social media and the evolution of the Web in general. Whether it’s blogging, personal networking, content sharing, conferencing, or even full online application services, people have become used to sophisticated capability being available over the wire on demand.

When looked at from a business perspective, these developments can be viewed very positively. The general adaptability of employees and their willingness and ability to embrace new ideas and capabilities are clearly enhanced. Potentially, costs can be saved also, as many users seem willing to spend their own money to deal with business requirements if it means they can work with the tools they prefer.

However, tech savvy users solving their own IT needs can also create issues in the form of elevated risks and increased support overhead and costs. Contributing factors here are the desire to be different for the sake of it (with the consequences of fragmentation that come with that), a tendency to tamper with standard issue tools, and the enthusiastic amateur DIY approach to development and integration.

With this in mind, the topic of ‘consumerisation’ is coming into focus. By this we mean the trend towards users having a lot more say in the technology that is used in the workplace. Within this, we have users acquiring technology and services for business use on a personal funding basis or via local departmental budgets and expense accounts.

If you don’t see this happening in your organisation, then you’re probably not looking hard enough, so key question is how to deal with it.

The first thing to dismiss is any thought of simply blocking all of this activity. Experience has shown that if you try, it will just go underground, which makes any challenges even more difficult to deal with. Locking down the infrastructure and policing bans on certain activities is in itself very expensive anyway and, even if you go down this draconian route, can you really be sure that creative and determined users will not find ways to circumvent your control measures?

There are some lessons we can learn from more progressive CIOs and other senior IT leaders who started to acknowledge and embrace consumerisation long before it became as prominent a phenomenon as it is today. We spoke with some of these as part of the research for The Technology Garden. Through these conversations and subsequent research, it is clear that while no hard and fast formulas exist, a number of principles have emerged that are worth considering as part of your response to the trend.

The first and most obvious is to acknowledge that consumerisation is unstoppable, so the sooner you accept this and start to figure out how to deal with it, the better.

The next principle, and a good place to start when moving forward, is to establish clarity on what constitutes core activity, to which a set of non-negotiable constraints and policies will apply, as opposed to peripheral activity, within which you can accommodate more personal preference.

As an example, you might define the execution of ERP and CRM related transactions as core, but provide some freedom on how those transactions are invoked. In practical terms, this could translate to an SOA back end infrastructure that exposes transaction related services for assembly in any way the user wants in a portal interface, or access via any other suitable front end, whether browser, PC or mobile device based.

Picking up on a very key word here, ‘suitable’, it is important to acknowledge the difference between flexibility and anarchy. Even within the domain of peripheral activity, it makes sense to define some basic ground rules and guidelines around issues such as security, compliance, integrity, supportability and so on.

The spirit here is to meet users half way by agreeing to accommodate user preferences, but not to the extent of creating tangible negative consequences that will be difficult, impossible or prohibitively expensive to manage. Saying you will allow personal equipment to be hooked up to the network provided it meets certain criteria in terms of spec, securability, ability to receive electronic policies, and so on, is an example here.

Consumerisation best practice is evolving in many other ways, and it is impossible to go into all them here. It is, however, worth mentioning one more very important principle, and that is the one of visibility, i.e. making sure you have sight, as far as is practical, of everything that goes on. Through automated discovery of devices and software in the context of asset management, monitoring of network activity to track websites and online services being accessed, etc, the trick is to watch, rather than block, by default, and act when certain scenarios arise.

One such scenario might be the spreading of a particular type of clearly useful activity within the user base, e.g. some saw this happen with public web and audio conferencing services, then step in to either support what’s being used or provide a more supportable alternative that meets the same need. Other scenarios might represent more of a threat, e.g. the leakage of corporate information via social networks, in which case a combination of policy and education might be in order.

So, you can do a lot to manage, even leverage, the consumerisation trend. It is therefore far better to roll with it than resist it, otherwise you risk losing control and missing opportunities.

Vodafone UK ready to walk the walk

It has been very interesting watching Vodafone go through its journey over the past five or six years. From the delivery of relatively unsophisticated utility type services around telephony and SMS, it’s moved into the online media space on the consumer side of the equation, and has been edging more into the IT solutions space on the business side.

With regard to the latter, conversations with Vodafone have on occasions been relatively hard work. As with any organisation on a steep learning curve, one of Vodafone’s biggest challenges has been knowing what it doesn’t know when operating ‘off patch’. Initial discussions about plans to work with IT resellers alongside the traditional comms channel, for example, raised as many questions as they did answers. I have also never been particularly convinced about some of the company’s forays into the hosted business applications arena beyond email, though to be fair, I could say the same about most of the mobile players.

A year or two ago, however, things started to come together in terms of plans and aspirations. Over a relatively short space of time, Vodafone seemed to wise up and articulate where it was headed in a much more realistic and coherent manner, at least at a high level. I suspect the recruitment of talent from the IT sector had something to do with this, but the impact of some pretty interesting acquisitions undoubtedly played a part too.

In the UK, for example, we saw Aspective brought into the fold with around 120 employees and a well established IT solutions capability around core business applications such as CRM, field service automation, and business intelligence. With a strong professional services team experienced in the whole application lifecycle, from initial requirements assessment, through configuration and deployment, to mobile and remote access, Vodafone had acquired both skills and street credibility in the enterprise applications space. The injection of of a bit of enterprise IT culture into the overall mix undoubtedly had a positive impact too.

Meanwhile, Vodafone also had ambitions to cross the boundary between mobile and fixed communications and move up the value chain to deliver more services on top of the core voice and data proposition. A key acquisition here within the UK market was Central Telecom. This brought with it another set of important skills, this time in the Unified Communications (UC) arena. With around 200 people in the service delivery domain (300 total), 6,000 existing customers, and established partnerships with the likes of Avaya and Nortel, Vodafone had again accelerated its journey to credibility and capability in a new domain.

Of course to really capitalise on all this, it was going to be necessary to pull the threads together with existing capability into some kind of coherent strategy. For a while, however, it wasn't particularly obvious how this would be done. Indeed, there was a period over which I stopped asking how Apective was being integrated into the mother ship as I wasn't getting any particularly useful responses. As it turns out, this is because Vodafone UK had been spending a serious amount of time analysing the way the market is going and figuring out its position within it.

Having been through that exercise, what's come out the other end is actually a pretty good analysis and a very convincing strategy, at least in relation to the large enterprise space. Beyond traditional voice services, for example, there is now pretty well-established demand for mobile messaging around the BlackBerry, Windows Mobile and other advanced devices, and Vodafone's existing home-grown professional services group continues to be aligned with this.

We then have an extremely lively secure remote access arena, and one of the most common activities going on here is enterprises extending the reach of their core business systems out into the field via mobile middleware and devices. Not surprisingly, the resources picked up as part of the Aspective acquisition, with their knowledge and understanding of enterprise application world as well as mobile technology, have been refocused in this area. This represents a bit of a shift in emphasis from the original Aspective proposition of delivering core application solutions and services per se, but makes a lot of sense in the context of Vodafone's overall business.

A less well established market, but one that is receiving a lot of attention at the moment, is unified communications (UC), and this is clearly where the acquired Central Telecom expertise and credibility is being targeted. The obvious question here, though, is how Vodafone differentiates itself, given that it is turning into such crowded space. As mentioned above, it has inherited some very relevant partnerships with established IP Telephony players, but there is nothing unique about this when you look at the competition. However, by combining Microsoft's UC offering with predictable commercial terms around mobile services, and delivering seamless integration between the fixed and mobile worlds, it has come up with a comprehensive total solution that deals with many of the commonly encountered disjoints and integration issues.

Overlaid on these individual streams of activity is a management and delivery framework which is designed to keep things coordinated at both the market and individual customer level, and maximise the synergies between the various competencies that exist across the three service groups. This is important as overtime, as the buying community matures and starts to pull together their own activities across the various areas, which is still not happening as much as it ideally should, Vodafone needs to mirror that behaviour. For the time being, however, having the three areas of focus with separate but coordinated resources probably makes the most sense.

So does this mean Vodafone is now walking the walk as well is talking the talk when it comes to total enterprise communications? Well, we need to bear in mind that some of the developments we have been discussing are still not fully bedded in and proven as cogs that will turn together smoothly as part of the overall Vodafone machine. It is also important to understand that what we have described relates to Vodafone UK only, and while similar initiatives are being executed in some other countries, the group as a whole still suffers from a degree of geographic inconsistency. This is clearly something that multinational customers will have to work through when evaluating Vodafone has a potential strategic supplier as they move forward with their advanced communications agendas.

Credit where credit is due, however, and while it has been a long time coming, it is nice to see at least the UK operation starting to get its act together properly.