Volker Weber (Vowe) challenged the people providing statistics on the global email systems used in the top 150 or so largest corporations. He has set up a wiki. Feel free to join in …
Ed asked yesterday: I don’t see why you are constantly dismissive of the number of customers stat. The answer is simple. Statistics that seem to contradict each other make me curious. So let’s put an end to the discussion how many of the worlds largest corporations use Notes or Exchange. …
Source Notes or Exchange? Let’s put an end to those creative statistics
Update 26-6-2008
As I would like to “jump into the discussion” with regards to updating the wiki, I thought it would be good to list my assumptions here because the wiki doesn’t allow much room for discussion / interpretation :
- I make additions/changes based on information that can be externally validated; either though a casestudy or another online publication.
- Only public information, meaning that an organisation who is not (willing to be) a reference or has not ‘gone public’ with their decision on teir primairy mailplatform remains open for me. I would like to see public reference also for the accounts that are ‘ calimed’ to be Notes
- This is about the primary emailplatform / corporate standard email platform right ? So in that context the Domino aplication legacy is not part of the discussion in my opinion.
Ian,
I fully agree with your last statement, hence why I have and will contribute where possible and stimulate others to do so.
I am not too happy about the Notes vs Exchange comparison (Platform vs email)either but it is my understanding that we are listing (primary) emailsystems for these companies and not discussing their platform (at this time ?)
That would make it too complex, because I can tell you right now that almost none of these companies runs or will run on 1 exclusive Vendor.
We have to bare in mind that a lot of these large organisations benefit from a good relationship with both IBM (Partners) and Microsoft (partners) and that this wiki may suggest they made exclusive choices. They have and will nog in many cases simply because it is not at all in their interest.
So from an ROI / TCO perspective you are right, it is sub optimal to say the least, but on the other hand, they may face bigger TCO challenges than this in their IT infrastructure, s may be this is less a priority than let’s say getting their ERP standardised and centralised. Getting their global desktops standardised / outsources or whatever.
I disgaree with your statement of the single platform being an objective. Although this sounds nice, it is not a reality. THey do run ERP and other systems alongside their Collaboration platform(s). It is the integrated experience they want. This is why also IBM is worling closely with SAP and IP telephony vendors …
I understand how it would benefit Microsoft to separate the email platform from the collaboration platform when considering market share, because with Microsoft you have to licence multiple software products to compete with Lotus Notes so the ROI doesn’t look quite so compelling.
But many organisations that use Lotus Notes recognise the benefits of a single platform for both messaging and collaboration so they don’t necessarily see a distinction between the two.
And while I recognise that the list is still incomplete and has only existed for a few days, it seems to support the general thrust of the Gartner Group Market share estimates, at least at the top end of town.
But because it’s based on a public Wiki that can be maintained and objectively vetted by both Microsoft and Lotus supporters, which should result ultimately in a list that both sides can consider trustworthy.
That will benefit everyone in the long term, both vendors and customers, don’t you agree.
You are right, I didn’t mean one platform for messaging and collaboration, I really meant to say one software licence, one user interface and one administration responsibility.