Bruce Elgort: The State of the Lotus ISV

July 12 2007

Bruce kicked off a good discussion yesterday on the ISV market for Notes/Domino:

Now if we turn our attention to "applications" such as help desk, ISO compliance, CRM etc. how many companies are purchasing these types of applications from ISV's? It seems from the discussions I have been having with many of you off-line that companies would rather have their development staff build these types of applications rather than purchase them.

So what advice would you give to a company looking to get into the business of building vertical applications for Lotus Notes and Domino? Do you believe that the "Composite Application" features coming in Notes 8 will open up new opportunities for ISV's? What do you think?
Interesting discussion, and timely as we head into Notes/Domino 8 launch.  I know the ISV team has been working with a number of organizations on both updates to existing Notes applications as well as new ones that take advantage of the composite applications framework, the Eclipse client platform, or web services.  I believe these all open up new opportunities with Notes/Domino 8...but I also believe it will take time for the market-at-large to exploit these benefits of the new release.

Link: Bruce Elgort: The State of the Lotus ISV >

Ed Brill Highland Park, IL USA Category:  Lotus  Add/View Comments [9]

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  1. 1  Henry Ferlauto http://www.geniusinside.com | 7/12/2007 1:12:12 PM

    Would it be correct to assume that there will be the usual "roadshow" to all the major cities for the launch of Lotus Notes 8?

    If so, will there be exhibit space available? If so, what's the process for ISVs to sign up to exhibit?

  1. 2  Ed Brill http://www.edbrill.com | 7/12/2007 1:14:26 PM

    Henry, we discussed the roadshow back a couple of weeks ago { Link }

    I am sure more dates have been announced since then. Don't know about ISV participation, but your partner rep probably would.

  1. 3  Henry Ferlauto http://www.geniusinside.com | 7/12/2007 1:43:49 PM

    It was partially a rhetorical question. I was really trying to get at the exhibit space.

    Actually no more dates have been added (at least to North America), the rest of the planet seems to have an agenda in place. Only a few locations in Europe offer registration today.

    Thanks for the speedy update.

  1. 4  Wojciech Kroczak http://www.dysant.com | 7/12/2007 5:05:27 PM

    From our experiences portfolio I can say that most of our clients want to buy neither out-of-the-box solutions, nor built it themselves.

    There is a huge field for us - ISVs, who can emphasise flexibility of their development methods and tools.

    It is very often that it is cheaper for a client to order dedicated solution than buy some from the box.

    LN/D 8 makes development and integration processes far more easier.

  1. 5  Robert Harris http://www.nationalgeographic.com/ | 7/13/2007 7:20:42 AM

    As an organization that continually tries to keep costs down or flat, we prefer to buy our applications from vendors. We do not have the staff to build and support custom home grown applications. That is not to say that we do not build some small custom applications, but our preference is to buy off the shelf products that we can "configure" not "customize" to our preference.

  1. 6  Richard Moy http://www.dominointerface.com | 7/13/2007 11:45:48 AM

    @5

    I agree with you on that especially in the SMB market. But like everything else, depending on the application, clients are willing to spend the money to customize the application if there is a business case.

  1. 7  Ian Randall  | 7/14/2007 6:05:01 AM

    As my company has developed a vertical application that covers ISO 9000, ISO 14000, ISO 18000 and also for Risk Management standards, I feel there is and always has been a market for well developed and supported vertical applications.

    Like any other development environment, Once a Notes/Domino application gets beyond a certain level of complexity, the benefits of purchasing a package as opposed to developing something in-house becomes more obvious. This also applies to ISV's.

    Notes 8 simply strengthens the benefits of the existing platform. However, in my experience vertical solutions have to span several different versions of Notes, as many organizations can take several years to migrate to a newer Notes version (particularly x.0 versions).

    In-house development doesn't appeal to every organization, so I agree with Roberts comment that there is a large enough niche market for verical applications to flourish if they are well designed.

  1. 8  Tony Austin http://notestracker.com | 7/16/2007 11:22:30 PM

    Ed, here's another rhetorical question, a "Dear Abby" (or "Dear Dorothy Dix" for the Aussie equivalent): You stated "I know the ISV team has been working with a number of organizations on both updates to existing Notes applications as well as new ones that take advantage of the composite applications framework, the Eclipse client platform, or web services." Whom do you mean by the ISV team, and which ISVs have they been working with (a select few, or open to all registered ISVs, and if people don't know about the ISV program how do they find out), etc, etc, etc. For the record, I've been in contact with one part of the "ISV team" (but it may not be the people you're referring to above), and after satisfactory testing of NotesTracker against ND8 Beta2 and Beta3 am only awaiting the ND8 gold release to get final approval! As an aside, and just for completeness: somewhere recently you referred to one of the several IBM software catalogs -- it was I think the IBM Lotus Solutions catalog at { Link } -- but forgot to mention the Global Solutions Directory which has been around a few years longer (launched five or six years ago) and might still be at { Link } (except that unfortunatelyu IBM tends to rename/rebrand things too often, and change the URLs as things get moved from one server to another every now and again, making it quite hard to find things on the web site).

  1. 9  Ed Brill http://www.edbrill.com | 7/17/2007 7:29:43 AM

    By ISV team I mean people like Tim Shortley's team and also Tom Streeter. But they have some regional counterparts and funnel some of their work through other parts of the organization. I can't publish an IBM org chart here but am always willing to make introductions where it makes sense.