From an e-mail with the subject line of "Final Question from [Company Name]:"
. . . another big change for us took place the other week when we transitioned our email system away from the Lotus Domino ecosystem over to Google Apps for business. Overall the migration has been pretty smooth, my user's are really enjoying it, and it has been much less overhead for me to support. For the company of XXX people that we are now, it just did not make sense to keep with the big powerful Domino server and dedicated email client software. Notes has treated us well through the years but we needed to change . . .
As I thought back to the work that I've performed for them over the years, I realized that they afforded me the opportunity to present at COMMON where I talked about surfacing data on the AS/400 in a Lotus Notes application. That was also the conference where I first met Kim Greene. And quite a few other Domino on the AS/400 Rock Stars. Those were some good times.
I'd say that while the company moved off of IBM Lotus, it also afforded me the opportunity to work with some amazing people in a business that is quite creative and innovative, gave me a topic for a speaking engagement, and introduced me to the community surrounding the AS/400 (or whatever IBM calls it now). Too bad IBM (and I) lost a long term customer, however I believe that, in the grand scheme of things, the balance is in my favor. IBM may have enjoyed their money, but I was rewarded more handsomely.
Comment posted by Curt Stone11/18/2011 02:24:28 PM
Homepage: http://www.onecheekgeek.com
Yep, those were the good 'ol days.
Future's in the cloud I guess.
Comment posted by Henning Heinz11/18/2011 03:46:04 PM
The cloud might loose some steam when vendors are trying to achieve the same margins they take for on promises software. Currently Google prevents them from doing this but there might come a day when even Google will have to make more money out of their Apps business.
I know there is a lot of talk about cost but many of my customers still drive Porsches and spend millions on software products like SAP. So I would like to say that there will always be things where customers are willing to pay more. The difficulty lies in addressing those demands so that the product falls into this category. I have to say that IBM currently fails big in this category (and I believe they are fully aware of this). I mean when customers say they are going to replace Lotus Notes with Google Apps they cannot have done much more than mail, calendaring and some basic app stuff.
Now if Lotus Notes would have some kind of killer CRM, would manage the file servers, provide directory services and identity management and have some nice looking apps scaling to terabytes with splendid reporting capabilities!? Even add a healthy ecosystem of affordable nice looking applications from Business Partners and a modern development environment. Nobody would replace Lotus Notes with some Google Apps stuff then. Bonus points as those would probably not even look on Exchange / Outlook too. Now they do and this says much about what (some/many/almost any customer(s) think of their Notes infrastructure.
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