Microsoft and IBM have been publicly sparring over whose email/collaboration platform is winning in the marketplace. Microsoft Exchange/Outlook is clobbering Lotus Notes/Domino in market share, Microsoft says. Nonsense, counters IBM. Notes/Domino is as strong as it’s ever been.
We’d have to give the advantage to Microsoft. While market share estimates vary widely for Exchange and Notes, most show Microsoft steadily making inroads into IBM’s customer base. A recent IDC analysis, for example, showed IBM’s market share slipping 5 percent to 37.7 percent, while Microsoft’s market share has grown to 52 percent.
The numbers show that a significant number of large companies have made the switch from Notes to Exchange. Many more are contemplating such a move. It’s hard to blame them. Exchange/Outlook is a more up-to-date platform for email, collaboration, and business process automation. The Notes/Domino platform does a lot of great things, but it’s showing its age, and it’s getting harder to find technical personnel with specialized Notes expertise.
But before organizations make the switch, they have to answer one big question: How do you replace the functionality of all the Lotus Notes applications you’ve built over the years to automate workflows and business processes? One large financial services company faced the question this year. While it had dozens of Lotus apps, two were especially important. These were service request management applications that automated employee onboarding and it provisioning and other approval processes. The company estimated that building these applications anew would require over 2,000 hours of programming. Ouch!
Kinetic Request and Kinetic Task did the job in only 400 hours. (Read More). Now, service requesters go to the company’s corporate intranet, where they are redirected to a single company-branded Kinetic Request portal. Besides the 80 percent cost savings, the company got something even more valuable: a request management platform that is completely customizable and allows the company to add additional processes, forms and service items quickly and easily across the enterprise.
If your organization is thinking about switching from Notes to Exchange/Outlook, remember that you too may end up with a bunch of orphaned automated request management processes that once lived in the Notes environment. How are you going to replace them? One obvious solution is Kinetic Request bundled with Kinetic Task.
Cassy Lueneburg