An interesting blog alert popped up in my inbox over the weekend about a posting from Ed Brill, a respected Lotus Notes blogger and currently IBM's worldwide sales lead for Lotus Notes. The post mentioned Avanade and Accenture and referenced the Lotus migration which took place a number of years ago when Accenture made the decision to discontinue Notes development and move to the Microsoft platform.
You can find his post here: http://www.edbrill.com/ebrill/edbrill.nsf/dx/he-had-no-idea-but-then-again...microsoft-wants-to-steal-five-million-notes-customers
To be clear, Avanade never ran Lotus Notes, we helped one of our parent companies, Accenture, move away from the IBM platform over a period of years, this is well documented in the case study linked to from the Microsoft and the Avanade site as evidenced in the link below:
http://www.avanade.com/_uploaded/pdf/casestudy/accenturecasestudyln2ms460335.pdf
So apart from that (albeit minor) clarification to Ed's post I'm a little curious as to what all the fuss is about exactly?
Accenture is, and remains in my opinion, one of the best examples of a well executed, enterprise scale Lotus Notes migration which is publically referenced. Does the intimation that they are still running some applications offshore detract from the quality of the credential which highlights the complexities of undertaking a platform switch and discusses how Avanade/Accenture dealt with these complexities to successfully execute the migration?
It's actually quite clearly spelt out in the case study why Accenture chose to migrate:
"As a high performance business, Accenture foresaw a shift in the global business environment - increased collaboration, a need for a robust messaging and collaboration platform, and increased reliance on converged mobile technology such personal data assistants and cell phones. Accenture needed an IT infrastructure that would allow it to collaborate internally as well as with third parties including clients, alliance partners and suppliers. The proprietary nature of the Notes software, however, made it difficult to support this level of teamwork. "
Or more succinctly:
"Accenture wanted a better solution—one that would be less costly and allow for increased collaboration."
So there we have it, they made a decision to migrate as they had a clear business imperative to move.
As for why Lotus Notes may still exist in their environment today:
"Under the market economic model that Accenture introduced, the company is charging sponsors to host databases and applications."
So they are charging an application owner to host any legacy applications or databases that were left at the end of the migration should they not want it to be re-platformed (for instance for compliance reasons), the cost of re-platforming it turns out to be prohibitive, or they were willing to incur the cost of maintaining the application directly. So where is the problem with this exactly? - it's a business decision that has been made and clearly called out in the case study. I agree, this is a clear case of truism’s and FUD if you ask me.
Calling out a job advertisement from the Accenture Careers site looking for Lotus Notes developers in India as evidence that Microsoft is promoting FUD is stretching things a little too. Accenture as a consulting company has requirement for developers who are skilled on many different platforms to service their customer’s needs. If their customer is running Lotus Notes and has a requirement for development work to be continued because they have made the decision to stay with the Lotus platform I fail to see how this becomes anything other than a business decision by Accenture to hire consultants to service this requirement.
A simple if/else statement might help to clear things up
if ((Lotus Notes= true) + (Development Requirement = true)+ (Customer= true )+ (Skilled resource= Available)) {
Echo "Happy Consulting company";
} else {
Echo "Happy Competitor";
}
My syntax is probably wrong - and I'm not a developer, but the point is clear here, consulting companies stay in business by performing tasks requested by their customers. If they don't then their customers will go to another consulting company that will.
Incidentally IBM Services has a number of open positions for Exchange Server & SharePoint professionals for those that are interested in heading over to work for Big Blue: https://jobs3.netmedia1.com/cp/search.jsp?tc=1217273951548
Does IBM Services refuse to work with a customer because said customer is using a competing platform? No - they provide the service the customer is asking for and go on their merry way.
As for the comments around Microsoft's stated strategy to target Notes accounts to make the switch to the Microsoft platform - that is nothing but fantastic news for me. Not that I have anything against Lotus Notes or IBM in general, it's just that with a growing practice around helping customers move from Lotus Domino to Exchange this is music to my ears. I have been our Solution owner for Lotus to Microsoft migrations for close to 2 years now, in that time I have seen our practice double in size and it continues to grow steadily today towards doubling again.
A quick tally up of our top 50 customers who are migrating away from Domino gave me a rough figure of just over 1million seats migrated ( yes, those are actually deployed Exchange seats and yes it may be off by a couple of % points) in the past 24months. Some of these were "new" switchers, others had owned the licenses for a while and chose to deploy for their various reasons. Not quite the same numbers that Microsoft has mentioned have been moved, though we are but 1 of 40,000+ Microsoft partners worldwide – I’m sure some of the others are doing Domino to Exchange work as well.
So in closing off I guess I agree with Ed here on his last comment of his blog post more than anything else:
"I hesitate to make more noise out of any of these episodes of the past, because our story is solid and there's no need to be constantly and loudly defensive. On the other hand, when the truth is out there, doesn't it deserve to be heard? "
You're right Ed, the truth does deserve to be heard, both sides of the truth of course....