A number of blogs (Charles Robinson, Philip Storry and Ed Brill) are discussing the challenges of bringing Lotus to the SMB. IBM Lotus Notes/Domino is known for its reliability and scalability which makes it a natural choice for large organization. Until a few years ago Domino was a self-contained platform that was very adaptable to many different business requirements without the need for “twin PhDs in computer science and comparative philology to install“, which made it also a palatable choice for SMBs.

Times are changing:

“None of the new functionality uses Domino. Activity Explorer is deployed on Websphere and DB2. The Sametime RTC Gateway is as well. Lotus Component Designer can’t deploy to Domino, you have to deploy to Websphere Portal. The only real interface is web-based, but you can wire it into a composite application in Notes 8 — provided you use the Standard (Eclipse-derived) client, which comes with its own huge list of caveats. The early buzz changed to cries of outrage.”

As a solution provider to the Domino customer base, I have to agree with Charles’ and Philip’s observations. The significant expansion of the technology stack required to run “Lotus” solutions will automatically deter large parts of the SMB market. And that’s not just because of the higher up-front investment, but the cost of acquiring and maintaining the in-house knowledge to support all of these (new) technologies. The Sametime gateway is a good illustration of this problem, being built on top of Websphere and DB2. The complexity of the setup combined with the hardware requirements for a base installation does not make this solution an easy choice for SMBs.

IBM will need to simplify its architecture to be cost effective in the SMB market.

Technorati Tags: , , , , ,

Powered by Gregarious (41)
Share This
 

If you are new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. An RSS Subscription will deliver new Blog posts automatically to your computer.
Thanks for visiting!