Maybe we could do this kind of survey at IBM Connect 2013

December 7 2012

For the last couple of weeks, my inbox has been flooded with copies of an email that salesforce.com sent to IBM customers depicting how one organization moved their Domino applications to force.com and supposedly benefitted from the move. I rarely comment on the specifics of such examples, as there often is a lot of missing data -- what version of Notes, what kind of apps, etc. I'm also not even sure if that email is really having any impact; haven't had any customers ask me about it directly, and the link it takes you to on the salesforce.com website has such absurd claims about the difference between their platform and Notes that anyone educated on Notes would simply laugh.

But I have to admit, one piece of the Salesforce campaign is surprising.

You are not alone in being ready to modernize your applications; we've found that over 70% of your colleagues are planning to replace Lotus Notes. (data source: Salesforce survey of Dreamforce attendees)

You don't need a PhD in statistics to see all kinds of problems with that claim:
  • Sample bias: the attendees at SFDC's own conference are of course going to have a different attitude than the general marketplace about a product positioned as a competitor.
  • Future state: The question of "planning to replace" is an easy one to say yes to. Oh sure, I'm planning to replace my house, my car, my computer...eventually, at some point, if I have enough money, if the replacement makes sense, etc. There is no guarantee of action in that claim.
  • Audience: "your colleagues" isn't accurate, since most of the attendees at Dreamforce are salespeople, not IT.

Of course, IBM has different standards, and we would never conduct such a survey and then publicize the result. I sleep much better at night knowing we won't do this. Still, maybe this is an opportunity.

Any suggestions for a question I can ask the audience during my Messaging and Collaboration Roadmap session at IBM Connect 2013, and then start touting the overwhelmingly positive result? From Lotusphere 2012, this was the adoption of 8.5.3 moment, where a surprisingly large number of hands in the audience indicated they had already deployed the 90 day old version of Notes/Domino. Maybe I can even invite the person with the best question up on stage to ask it themselves. What should I ask?

Ed Brill | Highland Park, IL USA Category:  #ibmconect13  Add/View Comments [21]

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  1. 1  Christian Dencker http://www.performance-peek.com | 12/7/2012 6:15:54 AM

    I can not help to think about Professor Charles Dwyer and his topic? “How to Get Anyone to Do Anything You Want.” ...

    And then that I should suggest to IBM/Ed that you should do like Oracle with the DB2 advert, and Microsoft with ExChange and now salesfoce .. because it the opposite of what the Notes/Domino community stands for ... Transparency and collaboration!

    Bootom line ... If you answer with facts you lose ... If you lie/market/target salefoce with fear .. you win ... either way your integrity is at risk ... however .. there is only one way out of this ;-)

  1. 2  William Medley  | 12/7/2012 7:47:50 AM

    I have to admit I thought the same thing when i saw the email as well. They do have some very slanted views. If i were able to be at Lotusphere(yes I will continue to call it that!!) The one question that I would ask, is what does IBM plan to do to market IBM Notes Social Edition to the masses. This is an area that really needs to be improved upon. How can you ever fight bogus statistics from companies when the last real marketing campaign didn't even tell you anything about the product(just what exactly did "Lotus Knows"....) No one outside of the Lotus community even understood the ads.

  1. 3  Ed Maloney  | 12/7/2012 8:03:08 AM

    I'm working with Saleforce.com these days and it is a good product. However, many things that are very easy to do with Notes/Domino are very difficult to do do with Salesforce. Computed sub-forms? Hide-When property? I'm jumping through all sorts of hoops to try to duplicate these features in SFDC. The Notes ACL is also much easier to work with. SFDC may be a better candidate than some other platforms for migrating Notes applications. It is still not a trivial process and you are more than likely to lose some functionality along the way. Salesforce user licenses are also not inexpensive. In the end what are you really gaining by migrating?

  1. 4  Brian Moore https://www.bleedyellow.com/blogs/DominoHerald | 12/7/2012 8:07:30 AM

    I think it's important to. Why not answer with something done using the same method. It may be flawed, but no more flawed then their survey. And it will give IBM something to say - like "90% of respondents are now or will be modernizing their Notes applications with XPages in the next 3 months." You can add some well-done surveys to that.

    IBM, the company that brought you Watson brings you a solid modern application platform with maturity.

    Why let them have the mindspace?

  1. 5  Darren Duke http://blog.darrenduke.net | 12/7/2012 8:38:07 AM

    "How many people love Lotus Notes?" :)

  1. 6  Gregg Eldred http://geldred.com/ | 12/7/2012 9:20:56 AM

    I'd ask: "How many of you are getting pressure to move to another messaging platform?"

    Then, after the dust settles on that question, have your marketing people send out flyers/direct mail/e-mail to all of your "Lotus" customers telling them that IBM would be happy to help move them to "IBM."

  1. 7  Brad Hair  | 12/7/2012 11:30:21 AM

    @Gregg ... a slight twist. The question is:

    "How may of you are moving from Lotus Notes in the next 12 months"

    I would hope the answer is well over 90% of LS13 attendees.

    The rub, of course, is that they'll be moving to "IBM Notes".

    Besides the rebranding, it opens the door to conversations of Notes SE/9.

  1. 8  Roberto Boccadoro  | 12/7/2012 11:44:39 AM

    If the event was here in Italy I would ask a question to Salesforce, not the audience.

    Do you have good lawyers ?

    Comparison advertising is legit also here, but you cannot just lie when mentioning the other product/company products.

    - Easy to break apps : huh ? regardless of product/language every app badly coded is easy to break, including SalesForce's ones.

    - Remote employee access: client software. Yes! Right! In version 4, circa 16 years ago. Since then things have changed just a little bit. What kind of Notes version are you comapring to your "superior" product ?

    And.... top of it all....

    - insecure data. WTF ? Domino insecure ? You have never seen a Notes app coded decently with all the security features, right ? You hinting everyone can read data off a Domino server ? C'mon, even my 14 years old daughter knows better....

  1. 9  Paul Withers http://www.intec.co.uk/blog | 12/10/2012 10:20:39 AM

    It's disappointing to see a company whose product is integrated with IBM SmartCloud for Social Business slamming another IBM product in such a shameful manner.

  1. 10  Russell Maher  | 12/10/2012 10:59:07 AM

    @3 I was involved in a SalesForce project a while back and I have to say your analysis is spot on.

  1. 11  Brett Hershberger  | 12/10/2012 11:00:16 AM

    Wow... so what is IBM going to do to counter the clearly false claims of this competitor? Tweet about it? Mention it in a blog? OK done. Is there to be an IBM ad on LinkedIn (or any other media) to tell the story straight? If not then who looks "weak" here? IBM does, and by association the Notes community. This policy of not marketing specific products, as competitors are stomping all over them with unanswered false claims is not working. It's also part of the reason so many people think Notes has been shown it's hat and coat by the IT community at large.

  1. 12  Ed Brill http://www.edbrill.com | 12/10/2012 11:46:17 AM

    @11 watch your email :-)

  1. 13  Fredrik Malmborg http://www.replikera.se | 12/10/2012 4:06:18 PM

    @9 almost every competitor/partner does it all the time. For good and bad IBM never care to join the throwing of mud in peoples faces. As a Business Partner to IBM, that makes me proud. If you are very strong you should be very nice.

  1. 14  Mark Roden http://www.xomino.com | 12/10/2012 7:12:40 PM

    Question for the connect audiences:

    How many of you who have through a migration from Lotus Notes to another platform have seen hidden costs of ownership rise up significantly behind the original estimate.

    Or something of that ilk.

  1. 15  Peter Presnell http://www.redpilldevelopment.com | 12/11/2012 2:49:49 PM

    Ed, a couple of questions i would like to see answers for are:-

    1) How many companies are surprised to learn just how many Notes applications their organization have managed to create since they first invested in the platform?

    2) How many organizations have considered migration to another platform but found there were issues they hadn't considered? If so, what were they?

    3) How many organizations have started to modernize their Notes applications with XPages, and are they pleased with the results so far?

  1. 16  Chris Haylock  | 12/19/2012 5:56:34 PM

    My suggested question is a three-parter:

    1. How many companies have considered (pondered, analysed, reviewed, pursued... whatever) moving off Notes at some point?

    2. How many companies actually moved?

    3. Of those that have, how many achieved their forecasted ROI?

    Could have a lot of fun with those stats!

  1. 17  Steve Wood http://www.salesforce.com | 12/21/2012 11:40:28 AM

    Hi Ed - Steve Wood, VP Platform, Salesforce.com

    You should do that kind of survey at IBM Connect! Would be great to see the results also. I'd like to add some questions:

    1. How many of you feel Lotus Notes is getting old and needs significant investment to keep up with the latest trends?

    2. How many of you would like to see better Workflow and Reporting tools built directly into Lotus Notes?

    3. How many of you are actively engaged with the business to put NEW applications in Notes?

    4. How would you rank your business users sentiment around the usability of the applications you create on Notes:

    Exceeds Expectations, Excellent, OK, Poor, Terrible

    5. How many of you are actively looking to migrate off of Lotus Notes onto something else?

    And perhaps you could post some stats immediately:

    E.g. Attendance figures for LotusPhere for the last 10 years. That might give us an indication of Lotus Notes momentum in the market. Happy to do the same for Dreamforce.

    Salesforce is not trying to "slam" Lotus Notes - particularly the developers - apologies if that's how our campaign is sounding. We just think it's been under-invested and customers are looking for an alternative - that's hard to debate. We can debate features back and forth - we have some, Lotus has some, some are better in LN, some are better in force.com - we think overall force.com is a better place to put your business apps going forward. We're investing in our platform, we're investing in your apps, and we're investing in our developers.

    If I were a Lotus Notes customer, I'd be using this opportunity to push IBM to "get back in the saddle" with Notes - they could do with a kick IMHO. Not congratulations on creating a platform companies have been unsuccessful getting "off of". Though I do agree - Notes is underestimated in the robustness of app people are building in there - moving off is non-trivial.

    Rosie's blog comes from a customer case study - merits of which we can debate until we're blue in the case - but the fact remains, we're telling a customer story, you can watch it here:

    { Link }

    Cheers,

    Steve

  1. 18  Ed Brill http://www.edbrill.com | 12/25/2012 11:33:34 AM

    @17 Hi Steve, thanks for stopping by, shame it took two weeks. Maybe you need some social business tools to help with engagement :-)

    These are all great FUD questions, but they fly counter to the tens of thousands of XPages developers who are building and deploying new applications in Domino environments worldwide. One customer story doesn't support all of your claims, and the story doesn't include the hard ROI you insist exists.

    Dreamforce is indeed a successful conference and growing. However, as I understand it, the vast majority of attendees come from the ranks of salespeople who use salesforce.com for CRM. Let's try to compare like for like, where I believe the audience at IBM's conferences is likewise steady and growing.

    I'll leave it to readers to finish drawing conclusions.

  1. 19  David Hoff http://www.cloudsherpas.com | 1/3/2013 10:37:10 AM

    @18

    I don't think you can make a like-for-like comparison between either the conferences or technologies.

    There's no question Dreamforce was dramatically larger - 90k @ Dreamforce vs. 5k at Lotusphere 2012 ({ Link }

    Discounting the dot.com boom years, I remember a few years that attendance was 7k+, so I don't think it would accurate to say that it is growing. Likewise, not all attendees at Dreamforce were paying attendees.

  1. 20  Steve Wood http://www.salesforce.com | 1/3/2013 8:09:34 PM

    Just to be clear - I was meaning relative attendance from year to year of the same conference. So - how many people have attended each year to get a sense market momentum around Lotus Notes. The reason I'm asking is a little tongue and cheek obviously. I already know the numbers show a decline in attendance - which would indicate the market is moving away from Lotus Notes. I will continue to reaffirm the Lotus Notes is "getting on" and IBM have under-invested. The question you have to ask is - if IBM isn't investing, why would you as a customer? Might be a good time to look at alternatives - and I (with an obvious bias!) strongly believe force.com is a great alternative. Our growth in force.com specifically speaks to that.

  1. 21  Ed Brill http://www.edbrill.com | 1/9/2013 9:13:42 PM

    Our investment in Notes/Domino continues to be signfiicant, in the hundreds of developers and very large dollars range. It's easy for you as an outsider to assert differently, but you simply are not correct.