Lotus Notes in the red

The Messaging is The Medium: survey results are in

Different survey same result. Lotus Notes is heavily losing marketshare. This time around The Register published survey results :

… The research examined preferences and activities by organisation size: corporate (over 5,000 employees); mid-market (250-5,000 employees) and SMB (up to 249 employees). Each segment has its characteristics but while the corporate and mid-market are closely aligned, the SMB sector marches to a slightly different drummer.

Corporates

The survey asked respondents what email and messaging platforms they were using and how committed they were to them. Among corporates, the story is pretty clear; Microsoft is the platform of choice for over eighty pe rcent of respondents while a large proportion of Lotus Notes/Domino customers regard their own choice as a legacy system. (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: The relative importance of various email/messaging platforms to corporates

Despite attempts to refresh the Lotus brand with a combination of new Notes and Domino releases as well as a plethora of related products such as Sametime, Quickr, Connections and Symphony, it looks as if the ‘legacy’ tag is still hanging round IBM’s neck like a millstone. Compared with Microsoft, it also happens to score very low on the ‘becoming important to us’ rating as, indeed, do GroupWise and ‘other’. It’s dangerous to draw conclusions from such slight signals, but the signs at the moment bode ill for anyone other than Microsoft. …

…The responses to the survey from mid-market companies were very similar to the corporate responses. But, among SMBs, the ‘other’ category garners a greater share of the vote, with ‘committed use’ and ‘becoming important’ taking it to a forty per cent slice. Lotus Notes/Domino and GroupWise are almost ‘no shows’ at this level of the market. (Figure 2) …

 

Figure 2: Relative importance of email/messaging platforms to SMBs.

Microsoft Exchange, at 57 per cent is still in the lead but, among SMBs, it’s clearly far from the ‘de facto’ choice. This could be for a number of reasons, but the most likely is that a high percentage are not really ‘platform aware’ in the same way that larger organisations are. Only 56 percent claimed to be using an email/messaging platform. Many of the remainder will have their email and their web presence hosted by their ISP and they are unlikely to be aware of the underpinning architecture …

Amazing Only 56% of the SMB companies claimed to be using an email platform. what a great opportunity for Microsoft Online Services. Business Productivity Online Services brings Microsoft Exchange Online. “ Implementing Microsoft Exchange has never been this easy; the whole organsiation on Exchange in a couple of hours at predictable, low monthly cost.