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Tony Byrne

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Lotus and SharePoint - a mea culpa and other thoughts

6-Dec-2009

Tags: Enterprise Collaboration & Social Software

My colleague Adriaan mis-spoke when he said IBM was "slowly phasing out" Domino. IBM is doing no such thing. For that, I apologize. We have corrected the original post.

One has to be very wary about generalizing about Lotus, since that brand extends from the likes of Lotus WCM and Connections (which are really more closely tied to WebSphere), through Quickr, to e-mail and other groupware services, down to the Lotus thick client -- with much more in-between.

Nonetheless, I think it's worthwhile debating the larger issue of the relative profile of the Lotus/Domino stack in one of its capacities -- as a broad collaboration platform -- which was Adriaan's original intent.

Among those enterprises that have made a major commitment to Domino and Lotus for collaboration and knowledge management applications, in my experience they fall into three broad categories:

1) Those actively enhancing existing implementations across the board.

2) Those supporting their existing implementations, but not advancing them much, and retiring applications as they no longer serve their original purpose (usually over the course of many years).

3) Those pro-actively replacing Lotus/Domino collaboration and KM applications with various alternatives (also a multi-year ambition).

Although it varies by country and with enterprise size, from what I can see, the 2nd group above is the largest, and 2) and 3) together appreciably outnumber the first group in size.

This is not a blanket indictment of IBM. It is simply a recognition of a collaboration platform that has suffered competitively in the marketplace, however much Big Blue has modernized it and continues to support an impressive partner channel. As Adriaan pointed out, Domino and the Lotus stack more broadly have some advantages over SharePoint for collaboration, but Lotus-Domino is simply not matching SharePoint's growth in this part of marketplace.

If there are lessons here, they are really for those new SharePoint customers with stars in their eyes. Turning over omnibus information management to a single vendor brings higher lock-in risks. Allowing custom teamspaces and collaborative apps to proliferate willy-nilly becomes unsupportable over time. Upgrades become increasingly fraught. Availability of experienced talent can become haphazard. Big-time platforms require long-term planning -- and suitable hedging.