Here’s a chance to register for some Lotus webcasts during June…
To register go to this page and then follow the links to the individual webcasts.
Thanks to my frolleague Mark Holmes for the link to a very enlightening article on ZDNet. It discusses the fact that although Microsoft Exchange has “clear market dominance” – figures and sources please, ZDNet – there are alternatives on the market. That’s probably not a huge revelation, especially if you work for a company that doesn’t use Exchange.
These Exchange alternatives exist because they tend to work out cheaper, as well as being easier to both manage and support. At the same time, they deliver similar levels of scalability and robustness as the Microsoft original.
“Robustness”. Anyway, moving on… the article freely admits that it doesn’t include Notes / Domino or GroupWise as alternatives. Why?
…mainly because they’re rarely seen as like-for-like replacements.
Note to ZDNet… yes they are. But okay, I think I know what they’re getting at, even if I don’t agree. Exchange does e-mail, calendars, that kind of stuff. That’s it really. Domino does a hell of a lot more, and to be fair so does GroupWise. So if they’re just looking at e-mail, why didn’t they mention LotusLive Notes or iNotes? Perhaps we should leave the final word to the one and only respondant at the time of writing, known as dnicoll…
To exclude the market leading competitive products from this review is simply inexcusable and makes the whole article worthless.
Like most people of the Lotus persuasion, I remember the days when advocates of Microsoft Exchange were very fond of stating that Domino was very wasteful of disk space because of it’s architecture – everyone has their own mail box and each e-mail (and it’s attachments) would be stored separately per mail box. So if I e-mailed 20 mb of file attachments to 10 users I’d be creating 200 mb of allotted disk space on the server(s). I’d also deserve to have my knee-caps broken.
Exchange on the other hand would save the file attachments once per server, resulting in much less space taken up… although the reality, so I understand it, was that the attachments would be saved once per storage group. Domino’s counter-argument was always that it’s architecture made it much more robust… problems to my mail box (which I’ve never had in 18 years) would not affect your mail box. But many are the stories of entire Exchange object stores suffering problems that take down mail access for all users for hours at a time. Domino advocates made statements long the lines of “disk space is cheap, down-time isn’t” – this is true, but there are cost of ownership aspects associated with large quantities of data (e.g. doing a back-up).
For Domino customers the big news of version 8.5 was the Domino Attachment and Object Service, otherwise known as DAOS. I’m sure that most of my potential audience know what DAOS is and does – it stores attachments once per server, therefore cutting down disk usage and also bandwidth usage. It also has performance benefits… if that large file is being written once to the disk rather than multiple times, the I/O will be reduced. Customers have been reporting reductions in disk space of up to 60%. All good stuff.
So what about Exchange? Well, while we’ve been moving in the direction of reducing the disk usage, it seems that Microsoft are pushing their customers in the other direction by removing single instance storage. An article on The Register references another article which states that the “change also reduces the overall size of Exchange databases”… but The Register conclude that “across a large enterprise with tens of thousands of Exchange users, there must be the potential for multiple tens of gigabytes of wasted storage space – if not terabytes”. Whatever, the overall theme seems to be more changes to the Exchange architecture, so no wonder in place upgrades aren’t possible. Meanwhile DAOS is something that’s optional and evolutionary to an existing and consistent Domino architecture.
Standard Life have spoken at Lotus and BlackBerry events in the past couple of years, but here’s an excellent write-up of how they use BlackBerry devices to extend the value of their Domino infrastructure and how they have provided BlackBerry-based access to their many TeamRooms.
Despite it’s small number increment, IBM Lotus Notes / Domino 8.5.1 is really a very significant release – not just because of the many new capabilities and improvements, but because it’s the version that many organisations have been waiting for to deploy. It’s nine months on from 8.5 and that extra time in development does show in an extremely positive way. I haven’t upgraded my Linux client yet, but the Windows and Mac versions provide a far better user experience.
Many other blogs and news sources are covering this today, so I’ll be brief. As you’d expect you can get more detailed coverage at edbrill.com and if you’re feeling really brave you can wade through the full announcement letter. For those of you with less time to spare, here’s an overview…
Notes / Domino 8.5.1 is scheduled to be available for electronic general availability on Monday 12th October 2009. My general advice to anyone is ‘upgrade’.
This article on ZDNet makes an interesting read on the pros and cons of Exchange 2010.
Bear in mind that upgrades to an e-mail infrastructure are never trivial – they require planning, execution, resources and funds, and sometimes carry a small amount of risk when moving from a mature stable version to a newer version. Although I show a slide with successive versions of Domino and the word ‘upgrade’ plastered all over it, I recognise it’s often a major undertaking for companies with thousands of users. However, it seems that Microsoft are willing to pile more risk on their customers and ask for more resources and funds.
Imagine you’re a customer running Domino 6.5 and you want to upgrade your servers to 8.5 – I’m not going to say it always takes just 30 minutes per server because often customers will use an upgrade to implement new capabilities, consolidate servers, tidy up aspects of the infrastructure and so on. But Domino upgrades can be performed in-place and allow customers to skip versions – 6.5 to 8.5, no problem – and servers can actually be upgraded in 30 minutes.
Compare that with the considerations for Exchange 2010…
Exchange 2010 is a 64-bit-only release. Other caveats: users who want to run Exchange 2007 and Exchange 2010 together must upgrade to Exchange 2007 Service Pack 2. And Exchange 2007 also won’t work at all on Windows Server 2008 R2, so users who want to run Exchange on the latest and greatest Windows Server release have no choice but to upgrade to Exchange 2010. In-place upgrades from Exchange 2007 to Exchange 2010 seemingly are prohibited.
Now imagine that you’re in charge of the Exchange upgrade – you have 30 Exchange servers, but the lack of support for in-place upgrades means that you have to build a new server and then move all the mail data from the Exchange 2007 server over to the Exchange 2010 server… multiplied by 30. So you need more servers (all of which need the latest 64-bit operating system and require hardware capable of supporting it), more time and by moving so much data across servers you have just substantially increased your risk of something going badly wrong. Also note that there’s no mention here of a direct upgrade from Exchange 2003 to 2010 – it’s probably not possible, but feel free to correct me. In the Domino world there’s really no major hurdles in upgrading the 2003 release (6.5) up to the late 2009 release (8.5.1). Imagine telling a Domino customer they can’t do an in-place upgrade.
We’re currently working on return-on-investment cases, but it’s fair to say that we’re seeing a cost of ownership reductions of 30% or more in upgrades from 6.5 to 8.5. The huge improvements in scalability could see an even higher reduction in cost for some companies depending on their existing server estate. DAOS, which provides an average reduction in mail storage of around 50%, is another big factor in the cost reduction. But I always say that customers should look at the future… and also the past. Domino has a long history of upgrades – never a migration, never a requirement to move data from one server to another. Yes, server operating systems such as Windows NT have been dropped and hardware does get replaced. Look to the future and you can be confident that in-place upgrades will continue. Look at the Domino server requirements and you can be fairly certain that Domino will be less fussy than Exchange about what it runs on. Got 32-bit hardware, got Windows 2003 Server? That’s okay – it’s what we call ‘protection of investment’.
I’m not going to deny that here in Lotusland we speak to some customers who are considering a move to Exchange. Funnily I’ve never heard the compelling reasons be anything to with the server, it’s always about either Outlook or an Enterprise Agreement that provides the software for ‘free’. On the subject of Outlook, I’ve found that a good look at Notes 8.x goes a long way to stem the cases of Outlook lust. On the subject of ‘free’ software, IBM run Project Liberate in order to show customers how much money can be saved on their Microsoft licensing… and even if the software is ‘free’ (which it’s not) the cost of the migration per user completely wipes out any cost benefit several times over. Oh, and then the annual cost of ownership will be higher. And we haven’t even got onto the subject of the mission-critical Notes applications yet.
Let’s imagine a customer running Notes / Domino 6.5 – they’ve reached a fork in the road, do they upgrade to Notes / Domino 8.5, or do they migrate to Exchange? A Domino upgrade will be the lesser of the two projects in terms of disruption, risk, cost, man-power and will deliver a scalable robust secure solution with a world-class flexible (and great-looking) collaboration client. What about the Exchange route? The current product is Exchange 2007, but Microsoft have advised anyone not already on Exchange 2007 to forget it…
At TechEd, keynote presenter Bill Veghte, senior vice president for the Windows business, said companies testing Vista should stop and move to testing Windows 7. The same advice was repeated for users who have not yet moved to Exchange 2007; they were told to skip it and wait for 2010.
So, Microsoft say that customers should deploy the new version when it ships in October or thereabouts. Hands up, how many Domino customers deploy a .0 version of the software? Oooh, not many, and here we’re talking about an upgrade to a consistent architecture. So how many want to deploy Exchange 2010 before it receives it’s first service pack? If you have your hand up my personal opinion is that you need your head tested. Service pack 1 for Exchange 2007 was released one year after the initial server release. For Exchange 2003 the first service pack came about 7 months later. Based on this, let’s take a guess at Exchange 2010 service pack 1 coming Spring next year.
In summary, Domino customers at this decision point have a choice – they can upgrade now and start to realise cost savings immediately, or they can wait until Spring 2010 to start an expensive and risky migration project that really won’t save any money at all.
Tim Malone and his colleagues from IBM Premier Business Partner Intec have published information about their iMigrate solution which assists in Exchange to Domino migrations, and it also refers to the Exchange to Domino migration at Foodvest (better known by the brand names of Findus, Young’s and The Seafood Company). Over 1,000 users from the Findus organisation were moved onto the consolidated Domino environment.
Intec also won an IBM award for their work, details of which can be found here. Congratulations to Tim and his team. We plan to work with Intec and Foodvest to provide a full case study sometime this year, so stay tuned. Along with Continental AG moving 40,000 users from Exchange to Domino, this is another good indication that customers continue to realise the value, power, cost-saving abilities and consistent roadmap of Notes and Domino.
To put this into context, every year about this time, Microsoft announce their spoiler – something to take the shine off Lotusphere. Previous spoilers have included new versions of the Notes-application-to-Sharepoint migration tool – yes, the one that migrates only the simplest of out-of-the-box Notes applications. Microsoft have become so predictable in doing this, and the spoilers have always been so weak, that it’s actually reached the point where customers and the Lotus community were waiting with mild amusement to see what this year’s bleat will be.
And here it is… Exchange now has a roadmap… well, okay, they’ve announced the number of the next version (14) and also said that it’s already been in use at some educational establishments who have signed up for the hosted version. So, it’s a version number, with no release date (not even for a beta) and scant details about what it will actually include. Call that a roadmap? 14 is a strange number given that it’s gone from 5.5 to 2000 to 2003 and then 2007. But look at it this way… Exchange 2007 was originally dubbed Exchange ’12′. So what would come next? I think Exchange customers already feel nervous enough about the next ‘upgrade’ without the version number being 13.
Remember this big Exchange news comes two weeks after we shipped a major new version with many improvements and new capabilities, and a focus on delivering a reduction in cost of ownership. I’m inclined to think this is more of a coincidence than a spoiler. Quite honestly, who’s going to say “oh wow, they’ve announced the version number”? Unless it’s in a sarcastic tone, and then it’ll work.
My favourite comment from the blogs today was “What’s the difference between Microsoft alpha and gold software? – the invoice”.
However, rather than just sit back and laugh at Microsoft’s feeble attempt to upstage Lotusphere (assuming it was), we’ve gone on the attack. Speaking as someone who is admittedly a follower of the divine Lotus religion, even I would have to admit I’ve seldom seen such a strong and gung-ho press release. Just look at all those companies who have moved from Exchange to Domino… and bear in mind that list doesn’t include some 2008 wins which have yet to become reference-able.
Anyway, here’s the article on CNN Money and here’s the IBM press release. Oh, and here’s another article on USA Today. It would seem we are no longer dancing round the opponent, we’re moving in and landing some punches. Next stop… Lotusphere.
Ed Brill has provided some links to items of press coverage on the now-released Notes / Domino 8.5, namely from Forbes and the Financial Times. Not to be outdone, I’ve been talking to the press too… not about affairs with super models this time, it’s all about the new Notes / Domino release.
From the interviews I’ve done in the past week you can now read the results at vnunet.com, Computer Business Review and CIO.
Due to the Mac-centric nature of the announcement (at Macworld), the conversations started around the Mac client, but by far the two most interesting topics of conversation for the journalists were the storage-saving capabilities of the Domino Attachment & Object Service and the integrated Symphony productivity suite.
What I love about the 8.5 release is that we at IBM Lotus have delivered another substantial version which delivers new capabilities which will benefit customers and help them to reduce costs… provided as part of a consistent upgrade strategy and as part of an ongoing publicly-stated roadmap.
Addendum… my frolleague Chris Reckling (we’ve known each other since 1-2-3 days) has published an overview of ten great 8.5 features. Of course, anyone who’s seen Spinal Tap should know that top ten lists should contain eleven items.
That’s nice to know isn’t it… especially as it pays my mortgage, feeds my family and keeps the wife in shoes. According to ChannelWeb, Domino not being dead is one of the ten big IBM stories of the year. Well, it is true, I can confirm Domino is not dead. Domino 8.5 is a major new version and will ship soon, certainly before Lotusphere, and boasts loads of new features. Some of these features will provide a lower cost of ownership to businesses using Domino – of which there are about 46,000 around the globe.
I would argue their statement about “Notes / Domino may have fallen way behind Microsoft’s Exchange / Outlook communications and collaboration platform in the market share race” – fallen behind, yes – way behind, no. Not according to the analysts. And Exchange is a collaboration platform now? Oh, of course, e-mail is a form of collaboration. And it has public folders. Aren’t they removing public folders from Exchange?
Furthermore, 2007 saw an increase of about 10% in Notes / Domino customers on active maintenance, and we’re tracking the same sort of increase for 2008. I would speculate that this is a result of customers seeing a solid roadmap and the fact that Notes 8 puts to bed the old ‘Notes is ugly’ argument. Not to mention the fact that integrated Lotus Symphony provides a viable low-cost alternative to Microsoft Office.
Add to that the fact that we are still taking customers off competitive products, and 2008 saw some major brand names switch to Notes / Domino. Needless to say, I can’t wait for these to turn into public references in 2009.
One last thing to say about this… Domino dead? Domino has a roadmap, one which we’ve talked about publicly. While the fine details of the features may be not public knowledge, many of our customers know about them. We know that the next version of Domino will be delivered in 2010, it will be based on the consistent architecture and will be an evolution, not a rip-and-replace overhaul. Ask yourself this… if you use a solution from another company, and that product doesn’t have a publicly-announced roadmap, shouldn’t we being questioning whether that’s dead instead?