November 27, 2000 12:00 AM ET
By Dennis Fisher, eWEEK .. When Lotus Development Corp. began pitching its knowledge management
platform to customers and business partners, many had a hard time grasping what
KM was and what the product, dubbed Raven, would do for them.
..
Now, nearly two years later, that confusion has not abated and, in fact, is
growing. And as it grows, Lotus struggles to redefine its KM strategy and
project a clear product direction amid mounting questions about Raven's release
and what its final form will be, sources said.
.. For IT managers still trying to get their arms around the potential
benefits of KM in general, Lotus' midstream strategy shift will only add to
their confusion. "KM projects are unpredictable ... so you need to stay close
to what [users] already know," and a lack of a clear strategy can prevent that,
said Rene de Vries, chief technology officer of Knowledge eXchange, based in
Nieuwegein, Netherlands. The CTO had considered Raven but couldn't wait
indefinitely for it to come to market.
.. In a pre-emptive move to try to prevent Raven from languishing in
anonymity after its planned first-quarter release, Lotus has decided to
eliminate its dependence on the company's popular Domino back-end
infrastructure.
Conceived as a single product that would be integrated with Domino and would
enable users to pull together various kinds of content and documents in one
customized view, Lotus has split Raven into two parts: a portal known as
K-station and a back-end database called Discovery Server.
.. "We're becoming more and more agnostic," said Joel Waterman, director of
the knowledge management business unit at Lotus, an IBM subsidiary in
Cambridge, Mass. "We don't care what messaging system or database system
[customers] use."
..
Waterman said that IBM's WebSphere application server will play a big part in
Raven, serving as the transaction engine. The WebSphere Portal Server and
Portal Builder, due next year, will also integrate with Raven and include
K-station objects.
.. Officials at Lotus, which launched K-station at Lotusphere Berlin in
September, said Discovery Server, which was originally conceived as the heart
and soul of Raven, will be introduced in the first quarter. Discovery Server
is the back-end glue that holds all of Raven together, much the way Domino
supports Lotus' Notes groupware client.
..
K-station, a portal, combines a number of Lotus technologies, including
Sametime and QuickPlace, and gives users the ability to search internal,
external and Web databases for documents and other information.
.. Once Raven is launched in the first quarter of next year, Lotus plans to
push it heavily in the application service provider market, hoping that the
lack of dependence on Domino will make the KM platform more attractive to
customers who have traditionally shunned Lotus products.
..
However, the bifurcation of Raven and its move from Domino have further muddied
the waters, causing some observers and potential customers to wonder, again,
about Lotus' strategy.
.. "This is not at all how it was conceived," said one source close to the
Raven project. "They're talking about integrating it with [IBM's] WebSphere and
not taking advantage of Domino. It's getting too complex."
..
The problems with Raven, to which Lotus has devoted a great deal of resources
in the hopes of making it the centerpiece of its offerings, also raise
questions about the company's future direction with regard to the challenges of
knowledge management.
.. And as one source close to the Raven project said, the technological and
strategic shifts around Raven may not be enough to breathe life into the
wounded bird. "I think it's very appropriate that they named this after the
bird of death," the source said. "Edgar Allan Poe would approve."