Leadership By Numbers

Category IBM/Lotus
Summit Strategies has published the results of a survey of IBM/Lotus Domino customers: "Email and Collaboration Deliver Business Value."

This study describes the results of the survey as well as a set of in-depth one on- one interviews with customers who had recently competitively evaluated alternative vendor offerings, and opted for Lotus Notes/Domino. As we discuss in depth, customers selected the Lotus Note/Domino solutions because they believe it is:

• Much more secure than alternative products such as Microsoft Exchange;
• Highly reliable and scalable, even when supporting tens of thousands of end users;
• Able to support tight integration of email with document management, workfl ow and portal implementations; and
• Supported by ongoing IBM Lotus software development programs that protect the customer’s existing investment in Lotus Notes-based applications while improving the email client interface, enhancing support for mobile workers, and reducing the total cost of ownership.

The survey is based on 100 customers, 50% with 5,000 or more employees. While it is not surprising that e-mail is considered "mission critical," it is interesting to note that security, performance, and TCO are the top three justifications that customers give for selecting IBM/Lotus Domino for their mail system.

The survey provides some useful guidelines for those hoping to maximize their Domino installation: "Despite their overall belief in the significant business value provided by email and collaboration technologies, most Lotus Notes/Domino customers agree that it takes a good dose of line-of-business support to ensure that organizations get the biggest benefit possible from their investments. Creating clear lines of communication between business and IT and educating business groups about the capabilities provided by state-of-the-art email and collaboration tools top the list of tactics customers should employ to maximize the business value of these technologies".

When asked, "What do you believe are key enablers of successful email, collaboration and workflow application roll-outs and/or major upgrades?" here are the top three answers:

• Rely on a well-defined, centralized requirements definition, application developnment and user acceptance testing process controlled by IT
• Rely on standards-based solutions to guarantee ease of integration and implementation across best-of-breed tools
• Tightly integrate collaboration and workflow with end-user's email environment

You can address Mary Johnston Turner (mturner@summitstrat.com) for further information.