Interview: How Lotus fits into IBM's On Demand vision

At Lotusphere, Ambuj Goyal, general manager of Lotus Software, met with InfoWorld senior writer Cathleen Moore and test center analyst P.J. Connolly to discuss the future of Lotus' collaboration technology within IBM. Here's one of our favorite quotes:

InfoWorld: Why should a company buy Notes/Domino/Workplace or move from Exchange or another competitor to Lotus?

Goyal: There are a few important reasons why they are [migrating from Exchange] today.  First, many are doing it because of security, whether they want secure Web-based messaging or secure client/server messaging.  Second, because of platform choice or flexibility: Very few do server consolidation, which is a big thing in the industry, on NT.  They do it on big Unix servers or mainframes or other big servers, not NT.  When they do that they need a messaging system.  In what we provide, you choose the platform and we run on it.  Third is total cost of ownership, also called performance and scalability.  And I am starting to see one more kind of change.  There are customers who are starting to think about what kind of end-to-end architecture they will have in their enterprise.  They say, "My direction is X and I want an open standards-based infrastructure, I don't want to be tied into a box.  I want the openness and flexibility [of an] end-to-end architecture, therefore I choose you."  Very few times we see a function/feature battle now.