One of the key market trends IBM has been pursuing is a convergence of many related markets, for example portals, email, collaboration and workflow, Bisconti says.

"The idea is that organizations want to be able to aggregate all of their applications, content and documents together into one, integrated user experience [which is] available to their end-users and customers," he says.

"This movement is one that we will deliver through innovations in Notes and Domino, and we will also deliver to customers that don't use Notes and Domino, through a more portal-centric adoption cycle."

"Many of the Workplace innovations, like activity center collaboration, our server-managed client technology, or Eclipse-oriented composite application support, started in the Workplace products but are now being integrated into Domino Next and Notes Hannover," he says.

"We have not announced packaging for Domino Next, but the portal technology that we are building Domino Next around is this WebSphere Portal 6.0 version [which IBM released last week]," Bisconti told sister publication, Network World US.