A service to all of you is reminding you every once in a while that evey month we publish new casestudies of organisations that trade in their Lotus Notes Domino infrastructure for the Microsoft platform. What’s good to see is that there’s more and more Exchange 2007 case studies in there.
Festo, a company with some 11.000 employees, is a good example of adoption of Exchange 2007 and integration with SAP Portal.
Go check them out : Lotus Notes Casesudies on Microsoft.com
Oh please, Peter. Here’s a customer that hasn’t done a thing yet except sit for an interview.
“Migrating to Exchange Server 2007 will”
“With the rollout of Exchange Server 2007, Festo will”
“Festo currently operates 100 mail servers running Lotus Notes on HP DL380 hardware. As it rolls out Exchange Server 2007, the company will”
“Festo is deploying”
Most sports teams wait until they score before celebrating.
The case study also has the ridiculous flaw that server consolidation could only be accomplished by moving to Exchange. While I’ve seen this theme time and time again, the reality is that there are Domino servers running thousands of users with gigabyte mailboxes without issue. I realize that is a flaw on the IBM side that somehow these companies see moving to another system as the only solution, but to act as if it couldn’t be done is just silly (it’s like “I switched from BMW to Mercedes because I wanted to be able to drive fast”).
Last, there’s no indication of what Festo will do with their Notes applications and how many of those servers will still be running after an e-mail migration.
Ed,
It may very well be the case that a full migration has mnot taken place.
“Here’s a customer that hasn’t done a thing yet except sit for an interview.”
They have done a very important thing; They have made a decision to move off of Lotus Notes Domino.
And please let’s not pretend for a second that this is about “flaws”. Most clients set a strategy, evaluate their options and choose a platform.
Funny how you and other Loti keep raising the Domino apps. This lockin doen’t seem to keep organsiations form moving. Ofcourse this is a point in most Lotus Notes shops. I don’t know of and how this is addressed in this particular case. I do know lots of companies that do what should be done whenever you decide to migrate away from your legacy environment :
– You analyse
– You rationalise
– You migrate
This is a normal process regardless the platform you are on.
And afterall these cases must have some relation to IBM loosing marketshare so rapidly …
Peter,
I hear the comment from Microsoft that IBM is rapidly loosing marketshare to Microsoft all the time, but little in the way of actual facts and figures to back up that statement. There are also many examples of organisations defecting from Microsoft to Lotus Domino.
The email market has become saturated of late but I believe that Microsoft dominates the market in smaller organisations while IBM has a greater market share in larger multi-national organisations or in industries that grow primarily through mergers and acquisitions.
So what are the actual statistics? How many organisations have moved from IBM to Microsoft in the last few years and how many organisations have moved from Microsoft to IBM during the same period?
What is the Size and Industry breakdown of these organisations? In which countries is the trend greatest or lowest?
What is the primary reason that organisations give for moving from IBM to Microsoft? It can’t be simply an economic decision, because Microsoft has no cost advantage and the cost of retraining every one is dead money.
The issue of application migration is also a valid one for many organisations that use Lotus Domino, because some organisations have developed hundreds or even thousands of collaborative applications over the years, and the migration of these applications that you call “legacy” is not simple nor cheap for them to do when moving to the Microsoft platform.
The tools that Microsoft provide to assist in this migration are also woefully inadequate, so many organisations retain both their Microsoft AND Lotus Domino platforms indefinetly.
So I am intrigued to understand why an organisation would migrate from IBM to Microsoft, if there was no clear economic justification nor a realistic opportunity to eliminate the Domino platform altogether in many cases. Unless their decision was entirely emotional or unless they are being decieved by false and misleading marketing practices.
Ian,
Thanks for this very clear question.
Do you have access to the report I quoted in my blogpost. It basicly answers a lot of you marketshare related questions …
I will turn my reply into a blogpost / link to lot’s of previeous posts I have done on this topic.
Will take 1 or 2 days as I am quite busy this week.
I will tell you upfront I can not quote copyrighted content but I can point you to the right reports …
This case study is misleading in so many ways. My takeaway is that Festo had an aging and poorly managed infrastructure and reached the point they had to replace it. It would have been nice had this case study been done after the migration was complete instead of on the front end. As Ed says, you haven’t scored yet. There are still plenty of places to trip.
Oh, and let’s be clear: the *only* component discussed here was messaging. No mention was made of getting rid of Domino entirely.
Charles,
I have no background with this client personally. As you may know in many situation a client is replacing “old” technology with new.
Also as in many casestudies (also when you look at those of competitors) they could reflect work in progress but address motivators for moving.
In some cases, such as Accenture and Grontmij you see that over time several casestudies have been made.
“getting rid of Domino” is not mentioned you are right and I don’t know if this is part of the scope. I do assume that no organisation benefits form maintaining 2 platforms when both provide the required functionality …