We’ve been around the Lotus Notes -> HCL Domino world for a long time - more than 25 years. We’ve seen periods of supersonic growth, torpid stagnation, long gentle decline, and various bumps, hurdles and spurts over that time period. But as of right now, we’re seeing something we haven’t seen for many, many years, which is a distinct and sustained interest in moving back toward the Domino platform - mostly in the form of organizations who had decided to move away from the platform reversing those decisions. Why should that be? And, if your organization made the decision to move away from the Notes/Domino platform and you’re starting to regret it, why should you consider coming back?
We think there are three main reasons:
1. It makes economic sense. (Your company will save money.)
Coming back to Domino represents a low-risk, zero disruption strategy compared to migration, especially if you had highly customized business applications on Domino. We know the story only too well. “Migrate to x platform,” you are told. “It will be easy. We have automated tools that will make it so.”
That approach goes OK for the simple apps, the ones that are based on the standard, out of the box templates. But then you move on to the functionality based applications, like time reporting or expense approvals. Not quite so easy. There may be off-the-shelf applications that can do most of what is required, but there is often extensive configuration or even customization that needs to be done to deliver like-for-like capabilities.
Then the real problems start to arise. It’s time to move on to the capability based apps, the mission critical applications with business logic built in. The apps that run your business. This is where migration projects often get stuck, because a slow realization starts to dawn that the original business case that you signed up to is just not deliverable. Costs, time and complexity start to spiral upwards, and the project ultimately stalls.
By this time many organizations have let their Domino license renewals lapse. They may not have upgraded Domino for several years, and so canceling the migration project and moving back to Domino seems too difficult or too costly. You can’t go forward and you can’t go back.
But if there were a cost-effective way to go back (see number 3 below), of course that would be the easy way out. Your business could save significant amounts of money by taking that path, and modernizing the Domino applications instead of trying to migrate them to a different platform.
Finally, it’s worth keeping in mind that the total cost of ownership is just lower with Domino. Last year’s “Total Economic Impact of HCL Domino” study by Forrester Consulting reported an average return on investment of more than 300% over three years by using Domino as an application platform.
2. Domino is cool again. (Users will actually like it.)
If you haven’t looked at Domino recently, you might be surprised at how much it’s changed in the last two years. The latest version of Domino:
Has a new lightweight client with a new, modernized UI.
Has a new mobile client that runs existing Domino applications on iOS or Android devices with no code changes necessary.
Is cloud-friendly, supporting Azure, Google and AWS.
is Office 365-friendly with Active Directory support.
Has new low-code development tools that let you build new applications 60-70% faster. (We’re not sure where HCL gets that number, but hey, that’s what they claim.)
Most significantly, we think Domino has got its mojo back. Your users might even enjoy using it.
3. It’s super-easy to come back. (Your life will get easier.)
In case all of that wasn’t enough, we here at Teamstudio, in partnership with HCL, are making it super-easy to come back to Domino. There is a new, simplified pricing model. It’s based on the number of users. Nothing else. No more counting PVUs or obscure licensing formulas. Just count the number of users. And the cost to bring your Domino licenses up to date will most likely be lower than you expect. If you have let your license renewals lapse, there is now no penalty for resubscribing.
In addition, we have the resources to help with the task of getting you up to date and back on track. Many organizations have people with the right skill set to do this work already, but if you don’t, we can help.
Finally, if you’re already a Teamstudio customer (or you have been in the past), you’ll know about our legendary customer service. Our friendly account management team makes a point of keeping in touch with our customers the old fashioned way, by having actual conversations with them. High bandwidth communication with our customers is a trademark of the way we do business, and if you have questions or concerns about anything related to the Domino platform, we’re here to help answer them.
If any of this sounds interesting, and you’d like to learn more, or just chat about any aspect of the HCL Domino platform, click below to start a conversation. We love to talk!