Thursday, March 18, 2010

Allianz drops Lotus mail for Outlook

As reported today in the news. Possibly old news really.

IBM must bring Lotus Knows to Australia sooner than later. There are more large customers here on the tipping point. Face it, the current strategy is not working.


8 comments:

Henning said...

Allianz HQ moved to Exchange years ago. No campaign in the world would have stopped this as the decision to globally standardize on Exchange for mail is a "strategic" decisions made years ago.

BrownieBoy said...

The news article makes no sense.

They're moving to Exchange while still lauding the benefits of Domino! (I presume "Lotus" = Domino in this context.)

Absolutely no mention of what they gain by the Exchange move. It's not like they're even going to save any licence fees if they're keeping Domino for apps.

grumpy_coder said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
grumpy_coder said...

Yeah.. I saw this was lurking a few months ago. I get the impression that locally they were happy, and infact they were big on IBM infrastructure, but globally it's a different picture.

IBM has the best kept secret, they just want to keep all the goodies to themselves, you may have heard of it, but I found out about it not long ago.... it's called Lotus Notes...Shhh don't let them know I told you.. Secret Squirrel...

Ian Randall said...

Migration of email by a subsidiary to the same email platform as Corporate Head Office is not unusual. So Alianz is simply not going to use Notes for email in Australia.

However, Alianz Australia seem to appreciate the benefits of continuing to us Domino as an application platform.

Even if this doesn't make economic sense, many organisations make similar decisions. They spend squillions of dollars to migrate hundreds or thousands of users and system to another email platform, and what do they end up with? ....email. And multiple systms platforms to operate, increased IT staff costs and a wedge that Microsoft can exploit to justify migrating their collaborative tools into replace the Lotus collaborative system.

Does is save them time or money in th long run. NO.

Are these organisations more productive or profitable as a result of such migrations, RARELY.

In the mean time, the Executive who made the original decision has moved on.

Perhaps IBM should commission a study to measure the tangible benefits or disadvantages of such migrations.

Is the IBM Sales worried about such migrations in the short term, APPARENTLY NOT, because they often maked more sales revenue by selling more black boxes and software licences and service for many of these migrations.

Adam Osborne said...

I know the IBM Lotus resources in Australia are working their bums off. The Collaboration Summit (Lotusphere comes to you event) they recently held had some of the best content I have seen for ages

Like how good was that Sametime Unified Telephony demo. Fantastic.

They just need some marketing backing so their voices can be heard.

Brownie said...

Doesn't make a lot of sense given this article. They have migrated servers of wintel to Linux Mainframe. Given that Notes/Domino supports Linux but Outlook/Exchange does not the migration does not seem to be in allignment to reduce cost elsewhere.

Brownie said...

http://www.zdnet.com.au/allianz-cio-lost-hair-over-linux-upgrade-339301891.htm#comments

I mean this article :)