This is a very interesting and compelling document that you should read before buying into Microsoft’s never ending falsehood that “IBM Notes and IBM Domino is dead”.
Indeed, the opposite is true. Of course, everyone acknowledges that there have been no counter-messages from IBM to Microsoft’s claims and IBM have underinvested in Notes/Domino over the last 10 years but there is change in the air – Notes/Domino V10 has a huge number of improvements and new features (some of which are very compelling) and with V11 coming out in 2019, it’s a very exciting time for the product.
Notes/Domino has now been repositioned as an “Application Development Platform” by IBM which is admittedly, an acknowledgement of the market reality. Although, migrating to Microsoft isn’t always the nirvana it’s claimed to be – many power users only realise what they have when it’s gone. Microsoft will promise everything will integrate better but how about pre-existing Domino applications you’ve spent years developing? How many of your current Domino applications integrate with mail? Generally it’s much more disturbing change than the sales people will tell you, with an unsatisfactory ending. Want a flexible mail workflow rapidly deployed? It’s not going to happen with Outlook.
Another huge piece of the jigsaw is that if you do decide to migrate away from Domino, you are looking at a massive capital investment plus a proven higher cost of ownership. We have seen this happen time and time again with more and more funds ploughed into migration projects with no real return at the end (other than users have Outlook). Bottom line is, budget for your migration, double it and then triple that to get the “real” budget. (e.g. from a real migration – 3 clustered Domino Servers running mail for 1300 users each with 8GB of RAM. Now migrated to Exchange on prem – 4 Exchange servers with 1.4 times the storage each with 64GB RAM and crashing constantly due to insufficient RAM and no answers from MicroSoft – better right?)
So, onto the purpose if this post, yes it’s a report commissioned by IBM and yes it’s partisan but I’ve read through this carefully and cannot see any flaws in the data. Domino really does provide excellent ROI (or TEI) compared to other platforms – have a read and please do drop me an email if you would like to discuss any of the findings or would like more information on Domino V10 and what it can offer your enterprise.
https://www-01.ibm.com/common/ssi/cgi-bin/ssialias?htmlfid=01022901USEN
Thanks for reading,
