All good things don’t last. Many years ago, 24 years ago to be precise,when Lotus Notes was launched in 1989 it was good then. It had a advanced app environment radical to those times. Unfortunately, Notes hasn’t kept pace with innovation and is very out dated in the current Web + Social + Mobile context. No doubt, Ed Brill and his team at IBM are making a desperate attempt to arrest the existing customers moving out of Lotus in large scale. Sadly, all their moves are at best only delaying the movement marginally. While IBM is coming up with incremental upgrades to Notes, to me it looks like putting lipstick on the pig, no different than Microsoft struggling get mobile done correctly. The most recent IBM announcement of dropping the brand “Lotus” and calling it “IBM Notes” only adds to the already existing fear in existing customers minds that they will be left with a white elephant.
So, why is this happening and what the key reasons behind Lotus Being out of context?
- Gartner’s Tom Austin in his 2011 report says doing a major upgrade of a 3rd generation email platform cloud cost $150/user and on the other hand choosing a modern email platform on SaaS model can cost as little as $30/user
- Users are agitating to move out of “Lotus Client”
- Cloud based Collaboration services are so powerful when compared to what is provided part of the 3rd generation email platform
- CIOs and TOP IT Executives can focus on more core applications that are critical to business rather than managing emails that has become a non-differentiating commodity. Think utility.
- Leverage the combined power of Web + Social + Mobile to create an empowered workforce to do more with less (esp. with younger demographics)
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I would be interested to know what version of Lotus Notes/Domino was (were) actually in use in those companies at the time of the conversion.
From experience, a well established and up-to-date Lotus environment (an environment that has always been kept up-to-date to at least N-1) presents no valid arguments for a migration. Integration of the Lotus/IBM system is the key here. I am not only talking about Applications but also about other portions such as LMC, TDI, Traveler, iNotes, Notesredirect, Sametime to name only a few. All of those are easy to integrate to the system and once it is shown to the users, they can’t get enough of it.
So there are really 2 keys here. Is your environment really in sync with what the IBM/Lotus team is pushing out and have you trained your users AND your administrators? (and made that information available often?)…
I have yet to see one thing that could be done by Google, Exchange or any other system that could not be done better with Notes/Domino.. This also includes upgrades…. No rip and replace since I started with LN in 1998!!! That has to account for something!
From IBM Notes/Domino version 9 beta
Jacques Page
The biggest strength of Notes is applications, which mail is just one of them. How much applications can an Exchange server host?
One CEO could have screamed: Applications! Applications! Applications!
The issue most of us face when considering this is the fact that we have hundreds of Lotus Notes based applications and internal forms that would need to be converted.
I agree. See this comment : http://blog.orangescape.com/2013/02/08/5-reasons-why-customers-are-leaving-lotus/#comment-794116741
In some circumstances…yes. Google Apps is a nice product, but far from the feature rich collaborative ecosystem that Notes/Domino really is.
The cost analysis makes a lot of assumptions…the $150 per user upgrade cost assumes moving to 64-bit hardware at a cost of $100 per user, implying that upgrades towards 64-bit client computers are tied specifically to the Notes upgrade. Servers at 64-bit? Well, the IBM i operating system (which we run) has been 64-bit since 1994 and most applications actually use 128-bit pointers…so we’re set for a very long time regardless if the hardware underneath changes.
No one problem is causing the demise of Notes. But combined these 5 are sounding the death knell. The good news is I’ve been in large companies that are switching to Outlook, and they still have hundreds of business critical Notes databases on their servers that would cost huge amounts to shut down. IBM needs to challenge IT managers who are making the switch to assess the business functions that these databases provide that are beyond email. This involves getting them to go out to user departments and asking the questions a) do you still use these Notes databases, and b) are you willing to underwrite rewriting these apps in SharePoint or a cloud platform just for the sake of shutting down Domino?” I believe there is a value beyond email that Domino provides (and that many IT managers would realize, if they asked the right questions). IBM hasn’t bothered to go back to these companies making the mail switch to get them to quantify that value. Want to keep Domino around? Forget email. Lose the battle, and good riddance. Concentrate on the way Notes makes businesses run better and more efficiently.
Beau,
I totally agree with you. Thanks for acknowledging that the switch is happening. In that report Tom says, there are 20 million apps that are still finding their way out from the customers who switched out of Lotus and 2 million of those are critical apps. These are gigantic numbers. Despite all the comments here from folks who work at IBM or partners of IBM, this single stat alone speaks volume. Period.
And, you are 100% right, that “APPS” are the sticking point. That is exactly where we come in. While we can run on any platform, we are focused on helping lotus customer who are moving / moved to “Google Apps” to get their long-tail of apps/workflows running on Google Cloud. We don’t have the power to influence a customer to switch from Lotus. Customers make that decision on their own based on market forces.
Anyway, I am attaching 1 slide from our solution deck. Hope that is of some use to you.
Suresh
Hmm I see 4 out of the last 5 bullets don’t apply to Notes. Notes is available as a SaaS model in the IBM SmartCloud. Users don’t have to use the client, a powerful web interface is available. Again all of this is available in the cloud. Finally, Notes has tons of mobile capabilities, web, and fully integrates with social platforms, like IBm’s own of course . Can you expand in what you would like to see.
What a complete nonsense this main post is. it relates to a 2year old document which (in the details) is describing there is no business case. So if you would have read the report completely you would understand that it does not make sense at all to move away. Actually the oposite is the case… Upgrade your users from Exchange to Domino to give them applications without having to pay extra licenses. So get yourself an update an see what the current IBM platform can do, especially what it can do beyond email!
Take a look at the full TCO, and include ALL components for a fair comparison!
we run both platforms for our customers, and Domino is a lot cheaper to operate and upgrade than Exchange.
I’m shocked by the complete lack of insight or analysis provided here. Let’s look at some of the talking points you have thrown together:
* Notes and Domino weren’t launched yesterday. Yes, we call this maturity and reliability. Just because version 1.0 was 20+ years ago doesn’t say anything about version 9.0, due out in a month or two.
* “Notes hasn’t kept pace with innovation and is very out dated in the current Web + Social + Mobile context.” Completely false. IBM has the largest market share in enterprise social software and has been ranked as a leader by Gartner and Forrester for three years running. Notes 9 is fully compatible with OpenSocial (try that with Outlook). IBM Notes Traveler is a superb multi-device mobile client.
* Gartner said cloud e-mail may be cheaper than on-prem, in a report from August 2011, and you’re spinning this into a blog posting 18 months later because…? (By the way, Gartner’s figures for the cost of on-prem migration and upgrades don’t match what I have seen, and the $30 per head figure for cloud migrations appears to be pulled out of thin air.) I’m in total agreement that cloud mail and collaboration makes sense for many customers. IBM SmartCloud provides the richest collaboration environment around, at one of the lowest price points. The cost of migration and suitability of the platform are generally dependent on specific requirements. To imply that some non-Notes solution is inherently cheaper is both false and an insult to your customers’ intelligence.
* Users are supposedly agitating to leave the “Lotus Client”. Almost always, these sorts of comments can be traced back to people who are using versions of Notes from the early 2000s, or more commonly, haven’t actually used any version of Notes for many many years. Certainly people could dislike the current Notes 8.5 client, but as someone who uses both Notes 8.5 and Outlook 2010, I’ll tell you that almost anything you hate about Notes 8.5 is going to be there in Outlook 2010 as well. The main difference is that in Notes you can probably change it to work the way you want.
* Cloud-based collaboration is powerful. I totally agree, although both cloud and on-prem solutions have their place. If you want cloud collaboration, try IBM SmartCloud for Social Business. Your “article” gives me the impression that you didn’t bother to discover that IBM has been offering cloud mail and collaboration for three years.
* CIOs want to focus on LOB apps not e-mail. This is true, but how does it support your “migrate to GMail using our magic formula” position? If you’re trying to say that e-mail is a commodity that can be best served from a cloud messaging platform, this would appear to apply equally to IBM SmartCloud. Of course, moving to SmartCloud retains full data integrity and gives you an enterprise-class collaboration platform. Moving to GMail gives you the same fantastic tools used by high-school students, grandmothers and diet pill salesmen the world over.
* “Leverage the combined power of Web + Social + Mobile to create an empowered workforce to do more with less.” I’m starting to get the strong impression that you haven’t used Notes or any other IBM collaboration offering in the last ten years. Sure, the modern workforce needs Web + Social + Mobile, and that’s exactly what IBM customers are doing with Notes, Domino, Connections and SmartCloud. They also need security, truly professional tools, offline mail access and a whole bunch more things that GMail and Google Apps don’t offer.
For your customers’ sake, I have to hope that this posting somehow fails to reflect your real knowledge of the mail and collaboration needs of business. Or is this really as far as your understanding goes?
you wrote:
“IBM Notes Traveler is a superb multi-device mobile client.”
and “offline mail access and a whole bunch more things that GMail and Google Apps don’t offer.”
I think that says everything about your comment…have you been out lately?
Gmail, is already offline on smartphones for some time (=years) and lately I can create documents offline in my browser as well with Google Apps. All nicely synced with the Google servers when I am online.
I have never seen any organisation using Traveler with no complaints from end users. Comparing the mobile smartphone/tablet power of Google to Notes feels pathetic.
“Richard van Delft 2nd
Google Specialist at G-Workplace”.
Traveler is in use in thousands of organizations and at IBM we routinely receive feedback that Traveler is one of the best things we did for Notes/Domino in the last several years. Not sure what kind of complaints you have heard but it’s not the feedback we receive.
Either way Rupert’s point is that IBM is offering the best in class mobile story for all devices, not just one operating system or mobile platform. That extends to full native clients for all collaboration capabilities – emeetings, file sharing, chat, and more.
I have just read the report , and my thought are these, the people leaving Lotus notes platform are only doing it because they only see and uses Lotus notes as a email client/server platform.If that is the way they utilise or will ever utilise Lotus notes Domino Platform then fine. However Lotus Note/Domino platform is more than this .It can be used as a web seerver , can and is very often used as a webservice provider by organization that knows the capabilities of the system and with the XPages feature better integration with other Enterprise systems like Oracle and other reputable Relational database system.
Perhaps the only weakness of Lotus/Domino brand is the lack of marketing of the product by IBM.
This is quite a spin: “The most recent IBM announcement of dropping the brand “Lotus” and calling it ‘IBM Notes’ only adds to the already existing fear in existing customers minds that they will be left with a white elephant.”
The IBM brand is the second-most valuable brand in the whole world. Why would tying the Notes product to the IBM brand somehow create fear of lack of commitment? Quite the opposite, it conveys to organizations that IBM itself – not some former subsidiary or sub-brand – stands behind the product.
Ed,
IBM is definitely a bigger brand, but as this post below alludes it is “Lotus Notes” that sticks in customers mind.
http://www.idonotes.com/IdoNotes/idonotes.nsf/dx/ibm-kills-drops-other-words-about-lotus-articles-around-web.htm
The change should have happened many years ago when Lotus was acquired, doing this change after 18years does NO good. My 2 cents.
Suresh
Sure, until Notes 9 actually ships, the “IBM Notes” name is not yet in front of end users. It will be very soon.
I agree with this statement “CIOs and TOP IT Executives can focus on more core applications”.
They can focus on more important things and leave something (like messaging and workflow applications and instant messaging and document libraries) that is working alone.
Excuse me Dave, Lotus Note/Domino platform is more than those you mention. I have seen lots of application as to mention one: the control of all the complex logistic of sea carriers by Notes Lotus taking care of all, including billing in different currency. Regards
…. if they leave them in IBM (Lotus) Notes, that is …
The caption of the report says:
“Migrating Off Notes/Domino Email May Make Sense in Some Circumstances”
I understand why you left out the “in Some Circumstances”.
It might be, that this is only really true for a small amount of circumstances, as the title suggests.
Jorg,
I agree. I guess the author wasn’t able to find space in the button as you can still it is already tightly fitting into the page. Will take care next time. Thanks for your comments.
Suresh