Ed Brill

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1. 1  Mark Hughes  | 9/15/2009 7:44:39 AM

   Great quotes!

1. 2  Ben Langhinrichs http://www.geniisoft.com/showcase.nsf/GeniiBlog | 9/15/2009 8:09:03 AM

   Excellent news - excellent win.

1. 3  Darren Duke http://blog.darrenduke.net | 9/15/2009 8:31:01 AM

   This is fantastic news. 58,000 is a real number. I'd love to know where MS get this 4.7 million number (in the actual article).

1. 4  Keith Brooks http://www.vanessabrooks.com | 9/15/2009 9:08:08 AM

   excellent work team and great to see the coverage of it.

1. 5  Bruce Elgort http://elguji.com/products | 9/15/2009 9:29:13 AM

   Nice!

1. 6  Andy Brunner http://ABData.CH | 9/15/2009 9:44:20 AM

   Great news !

   These are the success stories we want to hear :)

1. 7  Tripp Black http://www.mindwatering.com | 9/15/2009 9:56:09 AM

   Well chosen US Bank!

1. 8  Sean Smith http://www.aviall.com | 9/15/2009 9:59:22 AM

   Congrats! Hopefully 8.5.1 will be out soon and convert more companies!

1. 9  Petetm  | 9/15/2009 10:16:01 AM

   Ed, that's great to hear and even better that it's a win in the US. Now, if you could get some more wins in the Boston area, it would be greatly appreciated. :-)

1. 10  tom oneil  | 9/15/2009 10:35:09 AM

   Interesting article. Really interesting...

1. 11  Henry Ferlauto  | 9/15/2009 10:36:44 AM

   Congratulations to the entire team involved. Great win! If I recall correctly, this is the 2nd major bank to standardize on Lotus in the past year.

   It was also nice to see the point of "how" IBM won the deal (and amazingly Microsoft not disputing it).

   It is worth the follow-up to see if US Bank drops Microsoft Office and adopts Lotus Symphony as well. If that comes to fruition, that would make an excellent case study and more so a product specific ad.

1. 12  Brett H  | 9/15/2009 10:53:30 AM

   Great news! Good article too, unfortunately the marketing machine that is Google must have known about it before it went live and managed to get the ad space above and to the right of the text with their anti-Notes advertisments, it's a pity Lotus couldn't have grabbed that ad space to complement the article... hmmm.

1. 13  Karlo  | 9/15/2009 11:37:11 AM

   Great News!!

1. 14  Darren http://www.dadams.co.uk | 9/15/2009 11:43:32 AM

   The Microsoft quote is "Last year, more than 4.7 million people began the switch to Exchange and SharePoint from Notes".

   Note the word "began". I can name a few companies in the UK who began the migration and then stopped because of technical difficulties, or lack of funds or business case. I can also name a few who migrated off Notes for e-mail but have continued to renew Notes licenses (in a couple of cases they've grown the number) because they still have mission-critical Notes applications. Mind you, these will fit into Microsoft's "began" category because as yet they haven't finished the migration.

   Anyway, a great story, and if all goes well we'll be adding some more in Europe soon.

1. 15  Lisa Duke http://www.simplified-tech.com | 9/15/2009 1:36:52 PM

   A company with smart management - I will invest accordingly. ;)

1. 16  Henning Heinz  | 9/15/2009 2:24:58 PM

   Well yes great news but another customer that was already using Notes and is now buying new stuff and/or updating old one. I mean Microsoft is telling a story about customers that intend to move from Notes to Exchange (Turner did not say "began" but used the word "exchanged", whatever that means) but IBM Lotus mostly about customers that are already using Notes and now did not move to Microsoft. Or as Microsoft said it

   "IBM may even respond with a press release announcing -new- customers, who are, in most cases, simply deciding to keep Notes a bit longer".

1. 17  Jim Casale http://www.jimcasale.net | 9/15/2009 3:41:24 PM

   @16 I would hardly call implementing ND8.5, Connections, and Quickr "deciding to keep Notes a bit longer" - sounds like a major vote of confidence in the product line to me.

1. 18  Henning Heinz  | 9/15/2009 6:45:16 PM

   @Jim This is a quote a Microsoft marketing lady. They say that because IBM Lotus does not get new accounts (from Microsoft) they have to name accounts that have not been lost (yet as they say). I don't say this is true or false (I don't know) but if it is false I would like IBM to be more vocal about IBM Lotus wins from Exchange/Microsoft (and others). Otherwise Microsoft will keep telling that those just don't exist.

1. 19  Rishi http://lotus-blogs.blogspot.com/ | 9/15/2009 8:32:00 PM

   Great news !

1. 20  Venugopal Reddy http://certifiedlotusprofessional.tech.officelive.com | 9/16/2009 1:59:25 AM

   Excellent - Good news.

   Hoping good days again for world leader IBM (Lotus).

   The people who prefer security and consistence for IT environment takes good decisions.

1. 21  Rajes kuila  | 9/16/2009 2:47:22 AM

   Good news

   Well chosen US Bank!

1. 22  Ian Scott  | 9/16/2009 6:03:38 AM

   @16,@18 - Even if this is a retention of Lotus Notes it is also the REMOVAL of Sharepoint. Your Microsoft lady is taking about an intention. It may happen but until it does an intention to migrate is actually less positive than beginning to migrate.

   This is good news.

1. 23  Ian Scott  | 9/16/2009 6:07:31 AM

   Just had an afterthought. Having Sharepoint displaced must hurt Microsoft and especially if they see any Sharepoint deployments - nay, define any Sharepoint deployments - as the beginning of a migration to their stack. That's a nice one to think about!

1. 24  Mike McP http://www.openntf.org/Projects/pmt.nsf/ProjectLookup/mPortal | 9/16/2009 7:49:09 AM

   @23: That depends. If they were running Sharepoint Services, then the existing sites lost to Notes isn't a big hit (Services is essentially free, and largely a mess). The bigger hit is the loss in revenue on the prospect of winning the customer as a Sharepoint SERVER customer (big $, as all sorts of CALs are needed for that baby).

   I agree with you folks that IBM needs to combat the "X" million customers exchanged mantra that we hear from MS....seems to be largely unsupported by named cases. IBM is pretty good at naming their wins, but they tend to get lost in the louder MS message. Not sure how to tackel this issue...

1. 25  Ian Scott  | 9/16/2009 8:07:52 AM

   @24 - thanks for the clarification.

1. 26  Kevin Mort http://www.theglobalmind.com | 9/16/2009 9:47:18 AM

   Again though the interesting point here is that Microsoft's "began" comment doesn't seem to get challenged much, where ANY win by IBM is treated as misrepresentation.

   Sure this community calls it out, or at least some do, but regardless, Microsoft's "began" number should be given at least the same skeptical eye, if not moreso.

   @

1. 27  Kevin Mort http://www.theglobalmind.com | 9/16/2009 9:52:11 AM

   Could have used an egg timer to figure out how quickly the naysayers would come along in this.

   The interesting point here is that Microsoft's "began" comment doesn't seem to get challenged much, where ANY win by IBM is treated as misrepresentation.

   Sure this community calls it out, or at least some do, but regardless, Microsoft's "began" number should be given at least the same skeptical eye, if not moreso.

   @16 - And while I understand a net new customer would represent market growth and a good thing, there is really no need to pour water on every Lotus win that comes along saying "yea but..."

1. 28  Kiran  | 9/16/2009 12:01:35 PM

   This is really great news for lotus community.

1. 29  Henning Heinz  | 9/16/2009 12:16:15 PM

   @Kevin The story is a good one. IBM Lotus won against Microsoft, they sold new products. I don't want to make this a bad or false story. So you are right.

1. 30  Mike Kinder http://www.acadiasolutions.com | 9/16/2009 5:08:12 PM

   Late to the party, but thanks for sharing this Ed.

1. 31  David Hablewitz  | 9/16/2009 6:51:30 PM

   Apparently, not everyone at The Wall Street Journal knows about Notes' popularity. See the opening statement of this article in today's (9/16/09) edition:

   { Link }

   How about getting them to publish a similar article about Notes?

1. 32  Darren http://www.dadams.co.uk | 9/17/2009 2:01:16 AM

   @31 - despite Outlook apparently being the pinnacle of usability, there never seems to be a shortage of articles about improving the experience and how to use features which, you'd think, easy and accessible.

   Obviously a slow news day over at the technology section of WSJ - she uses Outlook, so 10 minutes to knock out a quick Outlook article. It's not exactly Pulitzer Prize stuff is it ;o)

1. 33  tom oneil  | 9/17/2009 7:27:17 AM

   Or... maybe WSJ knows that a majority of its readers use (or know about) Outlook.

   Let's not forget... the first compatibility vendors refer to is Exchange (remember the iPhone?).

   Hopefully the "Lotus Knows" campaign changes this mentality. Maybe cell-phone makers, will think: "Everybody knows Lotus, we better say 'Works with Lotus Notes'"

1. 34  John Lindley http://www.portalpartnership.com | 9/17/2009 8:27:37 AM

   Ed, this is of course a very positive story. The next question is, how does IBM and the Channel get maximum publicity and leverage from this? Is IBM going to produce a case study or reference? The Register is a good publication, but it's readership is not that wide. If every single Lotus Brand salesperson in IBM knew about stories like this, and if every single Lotus Partner was to be made aware of it through PartnerWorld, and if all of us had reference material to give to our customers, the impact would really start to build. I'm hoping that the "Lotus Knows" Marketing campaign will really make a big deal of stories like this, and of customers in other geographies (like Cluttons, who recently spoke at a channel event in the UK about their experience of ditching MS Office and investing some of the savings into a connections Strategy).

1. 35  Marky Goldstein http://www.rosa.com | 9/17/2009 8:35:27 AM

   .nsf is dead. The only way for IBM is Java and Innovation.

1. 36  tom oneil  | 9/17/2009 9:08:03 AM

   .nsf is far from dead. It's the only thing keeping Notes alive.

   I recently won an internal green award for a .nsf database (created in three weeks). My customer won new external clients and needed the same database/process. Do you what I did? "File\Database\Copy." In two hours I gave them a completely separated system to use.

   All I keep hearing is that .NET projects take too long and are too expensive. Are you going to argue that Java projects are faster than .NET?

1. 37  tom oneil  | 9/17/2009 9:22:41 AM

   I was a little strong with my "It's the only thing keeping Notes alive."

   I will admit that having 1,200 applications has helped fight our Exchange conversion battle. But .nsf is not "the only thing keeping Notes alive."

1. 38  Tim Haugen  | 9/17/2009 4:52:25 PM

   @24 - Sharepoint services may be "free," but the backend SQL Server licenses that are required quickly introduce a huge licensing expense -- before getting into full TCO discussions.