Leadership By Numbers

The Radicati Group latest study on Microsoft Exchange 2003 is showing a favorable edge to Microsoft:

This TCO study shows that Microsoft Exchange 2003 offers a significant TCO advantage over IBM Lotus Software Notes/Domino 6 (ND6), on the order of 41%. There are cost advantages in a number of key areas, including downtime and training.

Looking at the software-only messaging TCO, Microsoft had the lower 3-year average messaging TCO with $107.02/user, followed by IBM Lotus Software with $150.55/user. The results of this study show that Microsoft has taken great care and paid heed to customer needs and requests to come up with a far more cost-effective messaging environment.

Radicati has published similar studies in the past, and the Exchange versus Domino contest has sometimes been a cat and mouse game. This time, though, it looks like IBM is the mouse. Ed Brill has promised to make a response to the study.

I’m quite confident that the study has focused on the best of Exchange, and that similar studies could be done that would bring the ratings of Exchange and Domino into parity. I’m also confident that Domino will always suffer when compared against a single-purpose product (on this occasion, messaging). Domino is also an application server, a web server, a LDAP server, etc. So, Domino is inherently more complex as a single product versus any other single product. On the other hand, compare an installed Domino infrastructure against anything else, and IBM/Lotus starts to shine. Domino incorporates PKI for security with encrypted LAN traffic, authentication, electronic signatures and encrypted data. It supports replicated databases for off-line work (and work with non-Microsoft clients, like Linux) through web browsers. Domino can create and integrate x.509 certificates. And, Domino includes a forms-based IDE for programming and developing applications.

But, you know what? It doesn’t matter.

Every few weeks I train a new crew of administrators at my company, ICI systems, Inc. These administrators generally fall into three groups: SOHO or departmental server administrators; SMB administrators; and enterprise administrators. Each of these groups need different architectures, and it is a challenge to simultaneously develop and mature their implementations within only a few days.

In the spirit of the holiday season, I’ll make a couple of wishes.

• I wish that IBM Redbooks would develop a Domino Messaging publication that detailed everything about NRPC/SMTP messaging.
• I wish that the IBM/Documentation would have a chapter or two that developed a few administration-monitoring scenarios for the three different groups: SOHO/department; SMB; and enterprise.