Location : Cleveland, OH
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)?
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
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:
. . . 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.
- 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.
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
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