AT THE COMPANY'S annual Lotusphere user conference this week, emerging developments in knowledge management and wireless functionality have held a majority of the spotlight. InfoWorld Editor in Chief Michael Vizard and Senior Writer Cathleen Moore sat down at the show with Al Zollar, Lotus president and CEO, and Steve Mills, senior vice president and group executive at IBM Software Group, to discuss these issues as well as Lotus' role as a subsidiary of IBM.

InfoWorld: Given the company's knowledge management strategy and emphasis on collaboration tools, it seems that Lotus is intent on becoming a major player in the corporate portal space, bringing it into competition with Yahoo's Corporate Yahoo, Microsoft and its knowledge management allies, and eventually America Online-Time Warner. Why do you think Lotus/IBM will prevail here?

Zollar: That's a great question. I think we've seen through the development of the Internet that a lot of ideas spring up in the consumer space and sort of get hardened, or made fit, for businesses. So one way to view Lotus is that we have taken some of these ideas and extended them in ways that are much more vocational. For example, take a capability such as instant messaging, which in the United States is a teenager's preferred way of communicating these days. We saw that this was more than just a tool for socializing; we saw that it was a tool for real things like location of experts, exchanging of business-critical messages, and so forth. Look at some of the things we are doing around our Lotus Discovery Server and K-station, [such as] the ability to really filter business-critical information into a well-designed portal, deliver the right portlets that not only include external Web sites but internal documents and libraries, and access to important activity-based functions like e-mail and calendering. That is another example of making these technologies fit for business. So we are focused on the enterprise customer set at the end of day, ranging from small and medium-size enterprises all the way up to the largest companies in the world -- and we think if we maintain that focus we can do well.

Mills: I think Lotus was ahead of its time. Others are now coming to terms with the fact that this idea of collaboration between human beings is extremely important -- it's not just about information access. We've seen this with the Web now, over and over again, where somebody says, "Well, simple access to the Internet can replace the following ..." and then you begin to realize it is not just about getting at the information, it is about the interaction between people. We always expected to have competitors, so it is not a surprise, but Lotus was there first.

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