Leadership By Numbers :: Growing Demand for Lotus Technology

Category Administration IBM/Lotus Domino
Time to look at the numbers. After all, I'm getting more and more requests from recruiters and I need to check if this is a trend or not. One of my first litmus tests for defining a technology as hot is the ratio of administrators to developers. Simple, I know, but when there are more administrators than developers, then whatever the technology, it is either on the downside or has reached market saturation. Roughly speaking, administrators maintain and developers build-out.

Checking a variety of job sites, has revealed greater demand for Lotus developers than admins. It's been a while since I've seen this ratio in my area, and it bodes well for IBM/Lotus professionals. Interestingly, I'm also seeing job requests for Quickr.

The uptick for Quickr has taken longer than I expected, and it is just now coming out of the shadow of Microsoft's Sharepoint. Another tool that I use as a reality check is http://trends.google.com, so I plug in "Quickr" to count how much Internet chatter is active. Last time I checked Google Trends for Quickr, nothing popped up. The activity was so low as to be ignored. Today, the trend is showing life for Quickr, which is impressive. From my perpsective, the correlation of developer demand and interest in Quickr reveals that a lot of companies have finished their beta tests of Quickr and are ready to start ramping up for production deployments. Hiring developers during an economic downturn is a strong vote of confidence.

Technorati Tags: Lotus Quickr

Comments

5 - I always rate product popularity by developers - admins ratio. lots of admins and few developers at a conference is bad news. Its good to see it changing. The more developers required the better.

Posted by Paul Mooney At 07:43:48 PM On 11/07/2008 | - Website - |

4 - Interesting. I am technically on the admin side, but I do a fair amount of coding. It certainly has given me greater job security.

In any case, I'm just saying that what I hear and read suggests that Lotus tech is on the upswing. I've had more recruiter contacts in the last three months than ever before.

Posted by Jack Dausman At 07:24:54 AM On 11/07/2008 | - Website - |

3 - Ed, I see that too but I'm not giving in to the developer side after all these years. I see it as yes i can edit apps and update fields but not going to design a new app and neither are most admins heavy people.
Developers can get by as an admin if it's a small setup but hate being the admin in a bigger place as they get less coding done.
decisions, decisions.

Posted by Keith Brooks At 04:49:28 AM On 11/07/2008 | - Website - |

2 - As a Lotus BP that specializes in infrastructure, we don't do appdev, I don't entirely agree.
The more requests for Admins, the stronger the uptake on any platform.
They do go hand in hand.
Quickr is starting to see more dev requests, especially out of EMEA.
We do see more infrastructure discussions about extending Quickr, Sametime to the oiutside world.
Is it more than in the past, don't know as I believe more people suddenly found the internet and all the things they could be doing with it.
In my world the last 6 months or so has seen a huge influx of non-tech people into Facebook, Linkedin and other social media, which is also how jobs are being posted.
So it could be viewed as a medium is finally available to so many that we now see ALL the jobs getting posted rather than larger ones from Monster, Dice etc.

Posted by Keith Brooks At 09:00:23 PM On 11/06/2008 | - Website - |

1 - What I'm seeing is a new trend where the demand is for Admins with Developer skills. This makes sense since for most smaller organizations neither skill can justify a full-time position. Here in the Boston area the demand for both skills is increasing after a long period of decline.

Posted by Ed Maloney At 08:55:38 PM On 11/06/2008 | - Website - |