off the Hook

IBM announced a new "hosted Lotus Notes service" today targeted at businesses with 1,000 to 10,000 users. The price point is $8 to $18 per user per month. That's a minimum $96,000 per year folks - but just for Notes client-based mail and the entry/personal version of Quickr, no apps. (By the way, IBM has offered this option to the higher end of that spectrum and beyond for years - it just didn't have a part number).

There has been a bit of consternation over this topic over at edbrill.com. The consensus seems to be that this is generally a positive thing, but [there are also some comments I agree with that suggest] that (1) it may generate some confusion that lengthens the sales cycle to close a Notes software sale, (2) the existing Notes community will probably want more than just a Domino server in the cloud that does nothing more than provide mail services to Lotus Notes clients, and (3) this should really be targeted at smaller businesses.

Despite the fact that this may be seen as competitive to my company's hosting services, I for one am pleased by this announcement. Frankly, I just don't see widespread adoption of such a limited service offering by customers of this size. However, I anticipate that the net effect is that it will at least get businesses to think about the idea of using a hosted service for their Domino servers and seek alternatives when it falls short of their needs. My experience with businesses of that size is that they typically want lots of flexible options and an ability to build upon their mail with advanced features, such as access to mail from a web browser, mobile device support, embedded instant messaging and team collaboration, and integrated custom applications. If all they want is hosted mail, there are plenty of alternatives out there that don't required a 485 MB client download and installation. I'm sorry - I love Lotus Notes, but if it's just about mail there are easier paths. In fact, I believe that the only reason Microsoft has had moderate success with their similar offering is that they are able to convince customers that they are already installing MS Office, so they might as well install Outlook with it. Well, that and the fact that a large-scale Exchange deployment can be a substantial pain in the neck to maintain internally, thus opening the door for Microsoft to take that burden of their customers' hands, whereas a comparable Domino environment tends to just run with very light maintenance requirements.

There may very well come a day when IBM offers more hosting options, but for now business partners such as Lotus 911 still have a distinct offering with far more options and capabilities for businesses of as few as 10 users to well beyond 10,000 users at similar and often lower price points. Hopefully, the IBM sales force is able to recognize when the customer needs more than just "hosted Notes mail" and facilitate a smooth hand-off to a business partner who can provide it.

As always, I am very interested in the community's thoughts about my musings, so please, log in and comment.

I was tinkering around with Google Trends today and thought I'd see how some of the things that relate to my world are trending, specifically, web sites. Virtually every web site was pretty flat, but some are trending up, like LinkedIn.com for example. What really struck me is the tremendous spike in unique visitors to lotus.com in September of 2007. Of all the sites I viewed, I could not find any other that had such a differential spike in such a brief period of time. Anyone care to guess what might have caused that?

OK, many of you may be expecting something related to Domino or some other Lotus product here. If so, don't leave just yet.

So I have a PC at home that is about 6 years old. I rarely use it any more, but I have noticed it steadily getting slower and slower every time I do. Being a (semi) computer geek, I of course ensured that I was not running any unnecessary tasks, had plenty of free disk space, defragmented the hard drive, no viruses or malware, etc (and it runs Windows XP). Still it wasn't performing up to snuff. Realizing that all I really do is browse the internet, I wanted to blame my ISP, but my relatively non-powerful R61 does just fine. Then it hit me. The key difference is that on my laptop I have been using Firefox for over 2 years. I just let Windows Update do whatever it wants on the PC automatically and it had long ago upgraded me to IE7 and been updating ever since. I never bothered to switch on this old PC, but then I recalled hearing how much faster browsing web pages using Firefox is supposed to be compared to IE, so I firgured I'd give it a shot.

WOW! After 5 minutes to download and install Firefox 3.0.3, and migrating all of my IE stuff automatically, I feel like I have a brand new PC. We're talking 2 to 3 seconds to load pages that were taking 30 to 60 seconds with IE7.

Here is the most interesting part - When IE7 is running on my PC, all of the other applications I have running slow down too - in particular swapping between IE7 and the other apps (e.g., Notes) is painfully slow. When I close IE7, the problem immediately clears up.

Of course, your mileage may vary.

So what does this have to do with a Lotus blog? Well, lots actually. As I personally observed, it seemed to me that Notes was running slowly, which I blamed on the hardware at first, but have now discovered that it was the mere fact that I also had an IE7 window open that was causing the problem. Also, although I haven't specifically benchmarked performance against web-based Domino applications, it stands to reason that perhaps just switching your users from IE7 to Firefox (assuming your apps are not written exclusively for IE), could give users an instant performance boost.

I would be curious to hear whether you have had similar or different experiences. Regardless, I'm just thrilled to have regained so much time when using this older PC.