Lotus Software, part of IBM's software division, delivered a range of new products last month aimed at businesses wanting to add collaborative capabilities to their applications.

Dr Ambuj Goyal, Lotus general manager, talked to Computing about the impact collaboration technology can make to businesses and how Longhorn, Microsoft's next generation operating system, will stifle flexibility and open standards.

Lotus's latest product, Workplace, extends your offering in the collaboration space. What do you see as Lotus's core strengths?

We are good at people-oriented stuff: documents, workflows, records, contacts, team rooms, and chat. People buy Lotus for email and chat and emeetings, but they don't realise that the same infrastructure can be used to comply with Sarbanes-Oxley, do a better job of procurement or improve a call centre. We're starting to show the value of what we can do in case management, retail operations and business control centres - and there's more coming out soon.

You talk a lot with CIOs in your job, what are the key messages you're getting from them?

>b>Gartner says chief information officers are worrying a little less about cost control and doing more to support business innovation and growth. Is this a trend you're noticing?

CIOs are starting to say that they need to move their businesses forward. They realise that there are still important issues to solve and if you take a look at the overall space we're involved in, of human interaction and collaboration, you see us doing more and more for business value. We're creating organised workflow-oriented collaboration with organisational structures so you can do record management, file management, audit approvals, whatever. We call it collaborative workplaces, and that is what is captured within our four new Workplace products. Anywhere there are people in an organisation doing any business process, there is an opportunity to improve productivity. And whether it's a five per cent or ten per cent improvement, it's a hit on the bottom line. We're seeing more and more organisational knowledge being bought to bear on improving the productivity dynamic workplaces where you can get access to people, processes and information. Who does that? The CIOs have to take the leadership.

Many of the companies we talk to are trying to decide between J2EE and .Net as their primary development platform. What does the argument come down to for you?

I don't think it's .Net versus J2EE. I think there's an ecosystem being created that is either open standards-based, or that's proprietary. Once you are in the proprietary system, you have a single vendor who will choose their pricing and will choose who their partners are and what kind of technologies you use. When it's open, you create choice and flexibility. IBM's been on the other side of this argument in the 80s and we learned the hard way, because we couldn't compete with a faster moving industry. It's not that you can choose anything and integrate, the bottom line is that .Net technologies only runs on Windows, it only runs on Intel, only on Active Directory and SQL Server.

What are thoughts about SCO's attack on Linux.

I'm not a legal expert, so it's not my area of expertise. My general comment is that with any forward progress there are some people who don't want it to happen. But open standards will always win over proprietary. Legal matters aside, the right direction is towards open standards because they give customers flexibility and choice. ATM-based networking companies didn't like the internet, but the Net has created a whole new world of opportunity. So was the shift from ATM to TCP/IP a bad idea? It may hurt people over the short term, but the economic value of open standards is so much more that it must win. My business in the Linux space is small, but it will triple this year. I don't push one platform over another, so this is a pull from the customers. Linux is not about free; it's about freedom of choice.

IBM has been promoting its vision of on-demand computing as the next big thing. What contribution will Lotus make to this vision?

On-demand is not about technology, it's about a state of business. How do we integrate business processes, people processes and information across the enterprise so that we can respond to customers and partners faster and make informed decisions faster. So what is IBM's proposition? We're a technology company and a services company, so we're trying to bridge the gap between business transformation and IT. It's about integrating across the silos, integrating people, processes and information. Lotus plays the people part. We are the face, or the front-end, of on-demand.