IBM’s ‘Migrate to the Penguin’ Program: What’s all the excitement ?

IBM seems to take the cry for help by the Lotus Notes community serious by launching a new (or enhanced) program to lure Microsoft customers.
The move to the Penguin program is designed to convince organsiations running Microsoft Exchnage to migrate to Lotus Notes on Linux; a full ABM (Anything But Microsoft) initiative …

With IBM’s Linux-based email and other collaboration software growing at more than 200% year-to-year, the company today announced a new initiative to help customers move from Microsoft Exchange to IBM Lotus Notes and Domino on Linux quickly and easily.

The new ‘Migrate to the Penguin’ initiative is an expansion of IBM’s Move2Lotus program, which now includes more than 100 IBM Business Partners helping customers migrate to Lotus Notes and Domino and developing migration tools to help customers make the transition. …


I could ofcourse comment by :

So now Lotus Microsoft customers know why Microsoft Lotus business partners are suddenly so interested in Notes Microsoft deployments — they’re being paid a head-hunter fee per user to do so! How does that impact the value to your business of the proposal which will so directly enrich their business?

(thanks Ed)

The migrate to the Penguin Program is an expansion of the Move2Lotus program so it seems. I assume organisations are persuaded to not only migrate from Microsoft Exchange to Lotus Notes but also from Windows Server to Linux. Many decisions and consequences and not at all an easy migration. When considering such leaps, organsiations should get all the facts on this …

A “bounty” of $20 per head with a maximum of $20.000 for the partner … It is my understanding that clients could do a much better deal with IBM directly… Discounts of up to 25% – 50% on the Lotus Notes software are very normal when migrating from a competitive platform (Ferris report page 11), this amount is far beyond the Penguin deal …

… although even greater discounts are common. For example, server software and client software are both eligible for additional discounts of 25% to 50% for customers migrating from a competitive software product, such as Microsoft Exchange…

Aperently these huge discounts haven’t worked (enough) … So why would this marketing program work, you tell me …

In the press release, IBM is also claiming a substantial number of competitive migrations to their platform :

In the last two years, IBM has migrated nearly 3,000 customers from Microsoft Exchange and other email and messaging platforms to Lotus Notes and Domino.


The figure can easily be confused so that someone would conclude that the majority of these competitive migrations are indeed from Microsoft Exchange to Lotus Notes. Fortunatly Mike Rhodin clarifies that this is not the case

…We have had 500 migrations from Exchange to Notes last year, and Microsoft had it the other way …


Well … let’s wait and see what it brings ….