Duffbert's Random Musings

1 - As someone who is watching Gmail and Exchange possibly unseat Notes as the email system of choice where I work I would say the threat is real but I have my doubts if Gmail is up to the task. We have all seen the downtime and other issues with Gmail - I doubt it will get any better even if you pay for it. The biggest obstacle is the constant flood of "Can you" requests that almost every IT shop gets. I am not sure Gmail will include the "Can you?",s in the price companies will pay for Gmail service.

2 - 50 people does not a viable pilot make...that's barely a proof of concept for a firm of that size. Do the PoC, then pilot with at least 250 people. Only then would it be considered a feasible option to discuss moving forward. Until then, it lives with every other engineering concept that large firms "play" with every year.

3 - Shouldn't we all look at those companies and analyse why they are interested in GMail? Why do companies think about throwing away what they currently have? Aren't this valuable assets? Is it all about cost and have those only used Domino for email?
The whole discussion for me is a bit history repeating as Exchange / Sharepoint was not taken seriously until it left Notes and Domino behind. The XPages strategy is a bit dangerous as it requires some kind of redevelopment for many of your applications.
I think that the awareness of competitive platforms like Google is that they appear to move faster. If I talk to customers about missing features within the Google platform those are very confident that Google will add them soon. Maybe this is just clever marketing or the advantage of being a new player in the market?

4 - When organizations make the choice of moving to hosted solutions, (i.e. "the cloud") the number one consideration is the cost per user for the maintenance and management of mail.

The underlying concept of features or capabilities is not the case. The bottom reason is cost. When you are paying for thousands of terabytes of disk arrays, servers, people, and associated software costs, the cost of fifty dollars per user for hosted Gmail makes sense from a business perspective. When management looks at the cost of maintaining internal mail it is significant cost of the per user IT costs. As a result, not only Google, but BPOS and MOSS with Microsoft, and Bluehouse/Lotus Live with IBM are other solutions.

When moving to Google mail from a corporate perspective, the ability to move mail to the Google is not that difficult. Similarly moving to BPOS or MOSS with Microsoft can be done easily. Ironically enough, I have heard no offerings, or tool sets to move to IBM's cloud offering. In fact working in an organization that is doing a lot of these migrations, I have not see any contact IBM to work with them to help move existing Domino infrastructures to the IBM cloud let alone other platforms.

5 - As Perry mentioned - total cost is what is driving corporations to look at solutions like Google. The Google name recognition and "Google" generation - those that have grown up with only gmail account recognition - are becoming managers and decision makers. IBM needs to move at warp speed to get its cloud offerings including LotusLive ramped up and ready to go - with mail, with directory support (which Google does not offer), and with all the security mechanisms that IBM can provide. And then they need to BLAST the media to get the word out!

6 - Ask a Business Partner what he thinks if his customers are being put into the cloud and from now on is being served directly by IBM. I am not saying that IBM should not have cloud options but if big parts of your new cloud customers are existing Domino customers you have a problem. At least it is not so easy to find a good solution for all participants. While I think the 50$ of Google is hard to beat I don't find the 16$/month offer from Microsoft unbeatable. Domino itself is not optimized for cloud computing so I would not be surprised if IBMs offer is not based on Domino.

7 - @4 "When you are paying for thousands of terabytes of disk arrays, servers, people, and associated software costs, the cost of fifty dollars per user for hosted Gmail makes sense from a business perspective."

You get what you pay for. You think Gmail is going to have the same type of hardware you have now? Doubtful. Will performance be the same? Doubtful too.

@5 "directory support (which Google does not offer)"

Companies either don't know what they won't be getting or they don't care. Directories are one thing you mention. I use Gmail for school (since I am forced to) and wanted to look up someones email address since there is no naming standard. Woops can't do that since it's Gmail. How about resource scheduling? Want to book a room for a meeting? Guess you can't do that either (at least I don't know of a Google app that does).

8 - The Circle of IT continues, we revert back to a mainframe world.
Central processing(cloud)
virtual directories/areas/systems (VM)
limited user control (cloud)
proprietary (everything under the sun)

But if larger ones make the leap it will end Lotus/Microsoft side of this and thus the domino is an application server thoughts but is there really a world for it?

Anyone use Sun servers anymore? Application servers are just a platform, you can move to any other one at any time.

9 - It could just be an 'Amdahl mug'. That is, a token that the CIO puts on his desk to guarantee more discounts at a future barganing position.

(Getting a mug from the IBM mainframe clone-maker Amdahl guaranteed sharper pencils for renewals from IBM)

It also satisfies the 'Do it in the cloud' political lobby within the firm who probably will do anything to unseat Notes.

This does not mean it'll ever happen.

---* Bill