For Hamilton Beach, the financial argument for outsourcing email to the cloud was compelling. Two years ago, Hodge had his infrastructure team start evaluating email options, after IBM/Lotus announced it was sunsetting support for version 6.5.3 of IBM Lotus Notes in the first half of 2009.
. . . Hodge's team calculates that moving off Lotus Notes to Gmail will save about $500,000 in capital and operating costs over five years, and another $400,000 in labor. And that includes switching out the company's Palm Treos for BlackBerry smartphones, which sync up with Gmail.
I have a couple of thoughts on this:
- There is no mention (that I could find) of any Lotus applications. They may end up with two infrastuctures.
- Lotus Notes/Domino, in the sidebar, gets top billing as "the premium system" and "category leader."
- I wonder if Lotus Traveler supported Palm, that would have saved them time and money?
- In these tough economic times, simply upgrading to R8 may not be enough justification for some companies to save money (hard and soft dollars).
- While moving to the cloud seems to be a great idea, I am uncomfortable with someone else owning my messaging system. This probably marks me as "old school."
Link: SearchCIO-Midmarket.com: CIO's cost-cutting measures include move to Gmail
Technorati tag: Lotus Notes Lotus Domino Gmail migration
Comment posted by Maria Helm01/13/2009 01:05:57 PM
Homepage: http://www.mariahelm.com
I, too, am uncomfortable about outsourcing business email. I don't think it's old school - I think it's prudent. What if their antivirus or antispam product doesn't work the way you want? Too many false positives, or not enough filtering? Too bad. You have no ability to switch to another product. What if there is an unexplained problem with mail routing? Can you do anything about it? No. You call a helpdesk, get a trouble ticket, and wait. What about new features and upgrades? You have no say in when they're rolled out, and you'll be lucky to get enough advance notice to train your users in advance.
If none of those things are a concern for you, or if you're willing to take those costs for the dollar savings, then it might make sense. But for most businesses, the potential for losing messages (filtering, outages, etc.) needs to be under our physical control and ability to fix/work around.
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