Xerox welcomes KM, deal with IBM

Another business technology powerhouse has thrown its hat into the knowledge management ring, largely through partnership. Xerox has announced sweeping initiatives in an effort to position itself in the knowledge-sharing sector of the KM market.

"Xerox is committing to a strategy that transforms its core business, completes the transition to digital and leads our industry in a new direction -- rediscovering and reinventing the way people share what they know," according to Xerox chairman and CEO Paul Allaire.

At the heart of the deal is a marriage between Xerox's Document Centre family and Lotus Notes/Domino, a combination of scanning, document management, messaging/groupware, and print-on-demand technologies that will give users the capability to create and share document-centric information electronically or on paper, anytime anywhere. Xerox and IBM will jointly market solutions this fall, with broad customer engagement planned to begin in 1999.

Put simply, "Document Centre becomes the on and off ramps to the digital document freeway supported by the Lotus Notes and Domino software environment," summed Rick Thoman, Xerox president and COO.

Additionally, Xerox plans to form a North American Multilingual and Knowledge Management Services business team, with forthcoming technology to aid in the authoring and translation of business-critical documentation. Xerox will also offer a Documents Direct delivery service, and plans to integrate its DocuShare software with all networked versions of Document Centre.

Mark Hill, GM of Xerox's office business unit, says the deal combines Xerox's document systems experience, IBM's systems integration expertise, and the collaborative power of the Notes/Domino platform, creating "an end-to-end system for electronic and hard- copy knowledge-sharing in the general office."

Xerox will direct its European and Palo Alto, CA research centers to focus on delivering technologies that enable collaboration among office workers; product specifics or a timeline were not released.

Leading KM thought-providers at the Delphi Group see the deal as a good strategic move for Xerox, and a no-lose situation for IBM. "Xerox has yet to move out of the copy room and print shop and into the mainstream corporate electronic information management environment," according to Delphi. "To make it in that world, any survivor has to deal with the presence of the biggest player: IBM. Xerox is wise to partner rather than continue to attempt a war of attrition."

For IBM, the deal presents an opportunity to grow the Notes user base, "and in the larger picture puts a competitive package into the market that the Wintel/HP camp will not be able to match."

Delphi notes that Xerox still faces the challenge to turn this IBM/Lotus/Xerox platform into a channel for its new document software, which includes Inxight's visualization and linguistic analysis, document component management from Chrystal Software and Inconcert workflow. "This software...will be required to carry the Xerox of the future further into the office information technology infrastructure.