Gregg Eldred

This is an old one, known probably by a few people inside and outside of IBM, but it's an ironic one.

Back in 2009, J. W. Thompson ". . . the world’s best-known marketing communications brand, and a true global network, with more than 200 offices in over 90 countries employing nearly 10,000 marketing professionals . . ." announced that they were migrating from IBM Lotus to the Microsoft cloud for their messaging. Why would they migrate (emphasis, mine)?

Beginning in December 2009, we will begin transitioning users away from Lotus Notes and onto Microsoft Exchange 2007. The reasons for this are:

• Staying current with technology. We have felt for a long time that Notes is a dated email platform.
• Listening to our users. The highest volume of help-desk calls and general complaints stem from user frustration with Lotus Notes. These range from usability problems, compatibility issues with other email systems (client calendar requests etc), application slowdowns and crashes, and poor webmail service etc. Most of our new hires have Outlook or Entourage experience and are forced to learn Lotus Notes upon joining JWT.
• Reliability. We feel that the Exchange environment we're migrating toward will deliver a far more reliable end-user experience, both inside and outside of the office.
• Client relationships. Microsoft is a very important strategic client for JWT, so adopting Exchange demonstrates our commitment to this client’s long-term vision.
• Cost. We believe that ultimately we'll be able to deliver a better service catalog of messaging features to the users with a lower cost of ownership.

The new Exchange service will be delivered as a cloud-based solution that will be hosted and managed by Microsoft. The marketing term for this service is BPOS-S (Business Productivity On-line Suit Standard).

Reasons we are adopting a cloud-based solution are:

• Email is a commodity IT service. Our email platform doesn’t give us any strategic business advantage over the competition. Therefore it makes sense to allow a company that specializes in this field to concentrate on delivering JWT the best email service possible while freeing our time and resources to focus on delivering more strategic IT services to the business.
• Our capital spend on email will stop (server refreshes etc) and email will become an operational cost item.
• We will have a real financially backed SLA with Microsoft around our email platform.
• The email system will be far more reliable and redundant, since it will be hosted in specialized data centers with higher levels of security and redundancy than we could hope to deliver from our own internal data centers. The Microsoft data centers also are geographically redundant, so if one should completely fail, we will automatically connect over to the backup site.
• We will gain additional levels of Business Continuity Protection for our email platform, since the email servers will be hosted externally from JWT offices. Should a JWT office become unavailable due to disaster/power outage/network outage, etc., users still will have full access to email from their homes, hotels, etc.
• Roaming/Home users no longer will need to connect via the Cisco VPN client before they can get access to their email. Instead, they will transparently connect through a secure RPC-HTTP connection to our mail servers within the Microsoft data centers.
• The hosted solution will be an Evergreen environment (hence the project name). This means that we always will have the option to be on the latest versions of Exchange when they are released by Microsoft, and this will be at no additional cost or effort on our part. This is big: Most group companies are still running Exchange 2003 because they cannot afford the capital uplift for new servers or the project/resource time required migrating to the latest version. The hosted version of Exchange 2010 will be available in the middle of next year; if we so choose, we can have all our users transparently switched to this new version over one weekend.
• With the hosted approach, we will be providing some additional messaging services to our users. All PC users (MACs to follow in late 2010) will get an enterprise IM solution, which will also deliver global presence, person-to-person video & voice and file transfers. We also will introduce a complete hosted email archiving service.

. . . We hope you all agree that this is an exciting project. The outcome of this will see JWT on the most modern email platform within WPP and embracing the benefits of the industry-shifting technology that is cloud computing.

I presume that the migration is still in progress, as not everything they had in IBM Lotus has been migrated. How, you ask, would I know this?

JWT's 2009 announcement of this endeavor is happily still posted on their intranet, in the same web-enabled Notes database that one can assume it was originally published. (Check the URL - https://my.jwt.com/public/jwt_net.nsf).

My final point concerning this is about the emphasized text. One reason JWT migrated is in order to enhance their relationship with Microsoft. While this may not help them keep Microsoft as a client (I do know of companies that follow a similar line of thought), it made me wonder if IBM's agency (or agencies) feel the same about IBM's products. Wouldn't it be ironic (I'm really loving that word) if IBM's agency was using, say, Google, and didn't feel that they needed to change in order to enhance their relationship with IBM? Rhetorically, does IBM even care about such things?

Link: JWT.net: News: Project Evergreen

Link: J Walter Thompson

Comment posted by Dan Soares12/16/2011 01:41:37 PM

Looking at that site, I think it is safe to say now work has been done on it in a while.

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Comment posted by Albert Buendia12/16/2011 01:51:53 PM
Homepage: http://www.slug.es

A lot of projects that "start" for replacing Notes with Exchange, finally end with Exchange + Notes (doubling the administrative costs). Interesting to know that JWT is still having Notes and now have also XPages.....

"https://my.jwt.com/jwtnet/conference/services.xsp"

Isn't it an XPage ???

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Comment posted by Eugen Tarnow12/16/2011 03:07:36 PM
Homepage: http://avabiz.com

As much as I agree with that IBM needs to push Notes again, ad agencies frequently switch to using whomever their client is. Some move back and forth between Notes and Exchange depending on whether IBM or Microsoft is the client.

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Comment posted by David (The Notes Guy in Seattle)12/17/2011 05:55:26 PM
Homepage: http://thenotesguyinseattle.com

BPOS-S? Why are they going to that? They have 10,000+ users. They should be on BPOS-D (dedicated).

I like the point "Most group companies are still running Exchange 2003 because they cannot afford the capital uplift for new servers or the project/resource time required migrating to the latest version. "

Fool. Glad he isn't managing MY money! Do you think you won't have pay for those new servers when Microsoft goes to upgrade you? They aren't free and the upgrade process is no different for cloud environments than from on-premise environments. That's right. You will still have to buy that shiny new hardware. The only difference is in how and when you pay to get your upgrades. With the cloud, Microsoft has already bundled the costs of future hardware replacements and labor for the upgrades (it's a migration actually) into the subscription price you pay today. But it's hidden, so you can more easily lie to yourself saying it's cheaper than on-premise.

But what would your costs be in a Domino environment (either hosted or on-premise)? Just the labor, which is also much lower because it's not much more than running setup.exe. Yes, you still replace the hardware eventually, but you can use it longer and still run the latest software.

Stories like these make it easy to understand how P.T. Barnum made so much money.

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Comment posted by Tim Tripcony12/19/2011 04:18:26 AM

This is just one more in a very long line of examples of why applications can make Domino a strategic platform for any given customer but email cannot. IBM seems to be gradually understanding this reality; ironically (since you like that word, Gregg), I'm not convinced that most Domino admins get this... or even ISV's. I continue to hear a lot about how best to manage mail, but surprisingly little from the admin / ISV side about how to empower corporate developers to make Domino the critical path application platform it should rightly be.

Specifically, why are all the blog posts about XPages coming from XPage developers? Surely in the last three years some admins have learned how to precisely fine tune a Domino server to make XPage applications scream. Yet, to date, the most authoritative guide on this topic came from, of all people, me. That's kind of sad. In my experience, Domino admins know how to configure the hell out of a mail server to tailor it to precisely what it needs to do... but an app server is an app server is an app server.

To point the finger at ISV's, you've had almost two years since the Extensibility API was announced. How is it possible that there's still only a single commercially available component library that expands the control set developers get out of the box?

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