Lotus down 6 percent
by Volker Weber
Mark Loughridge, IBM's Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer:
Lotus software was down 6 percent for the quarter.
We are continuing our product transition from Notes Domino, which declined 6 percent year-to-year, to our new workplace offering which exhibited strong growth both sequentially and year-to-year off a small base.
We also continue to provide value to our customers by including the key capabilities of our Quickplace and Sametime offerings in our WebSphere Portal offering.
Comments
The quote "We are continuing our product transition from Notes Domino" - confuses me on the basis that domino still has a solid future and its not a case of a 'definate' "transition from" more a case of IBM developing new products with Domino being part of that - ie a possible "transition/merge" not "transition from" (MS marketing will use that quote as more IBM is ditching Notes fodder).
Either its a bad choice of words by financial people who are not in synch with marketing or i've misunderstood the recent messages about domino's future (or I misunderstand the quote! - its been a long and busy week).
Exactly my thoughts on reading that Steve. Looks like good ole’ IBM have done it again! Just waiting for the inevitable slew of “analysis” now... :o)
Ben, you can have one from me. :-) If the whole business goes down 6% because your main product goes down 6%, while the other product grows from a small base, it has to be a very very small base.
Is there any comment from ed brill ?
There's been a short but related discussion here at Carl Tyler's blog.
Thanks.
As you can see the thread is still waiting for the next answer from ed brill.
and it will not be an easy one due to this very accurate statement from the ibm chief financial officer.
IBM considers it a firing offense to say anything specific about financials other than what is reported in the quarterly/annual reports. I know that will sound like a dodge, but since I'm responsible for Notes/Domino sales worldwide, it would be reasonable to assume I have "inside" information.
What I will say -- IBM salespeople are on a 12-month quota, which means that they still have six weeks of selling to make 2004 targets. If the last six weeks of activity are any indication, there is a lot of good work going on now.
If you have a specific concern (or need help explaining) and want to discuss offline, e-mail me ed_brill@us.ibm.com . I can certainly say more privately than I can to 30,000 readers of vowe.net.
Well, I guess the least this will do is prepare a good number of people to have very urgent questions on Lotusphere 2005... looking forward to those and the answers as well!
