Ed Brill

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1. 1  Mirco  | 1/13/2009 12:38:55 PM

   I'm not sure, how you gotto the added $875,000 for directory and helpdesk service. Would you mind to describe these additional costs?

1. 2  Adam  | 1/13/2009 12:42:12 PM

   It's the projected savings they listed: $500K in capital and operating costs + $400K in labor = $900K.

1. 3  Adam  | 1/13/2009 12:43:46 PM

   Oops, I misread that one.

1. 4  Gregg Eldred http://www.ns-tech.com/blog/geldred.nsf | 1/13/2009 12:45:07 PM

   Thanks for adding more to the discussion than I did:

   { Link }

   While your hard dollar analysis is nice, it's the "other things" that make me hesitate when moving an entire messaging system to Gmail. Chris Linfoot understands, when he wrote about Google Apps, "...it is intrinsically easier to compromise an organisation's security where that organisation has chosen to entrust its data to a third party."

   { Link }

   As for your quote, "And I also guarantee that US$50/user/year is not the end of what they'll spend in migrating to Gmail," I don't think that we will ever be privy to that, will we? :-)

1. 5  Ed Brill http://www.edbrill.com | 1/13/2009 12:49:29 PM

   @1/2/3 I added $900,000 (their projected savings) plus $100,000 (round number) for the operational cost to manage gMail over 5 years. I did not include the gMail service cost itself nor the migration or training costs, but it would be easy to make this number mushroom.

1. 6  Jim Casale http://www.jimcasale.net | 1/13/2009 12:57:35 PM

   The school I am currently attending moved from Exchange 2003 OWA to Gmail. In the few instances I have used it I have had several error messages when trying to use the service. Not a good batting average.

   I have figured out how to configure the Gmail account to Thunderbird but only by trial and error. The links to the schools Gmail Help send you to Gmail's own Gmail Help...which does not have the right information for the new school Gmail configuration.

   Is corporate America going to get the same level of service from Gmail?

1. 7  David Leedy http://www.lotusnotebook.com | 1/13/2009 1:00:02 PM

   Doesn't IBM's hosting service start at a 1,000 user minumum? Since this company only has 500 users maybe they didn't look into it....

1. 8  Bill http://www.billbuchan.com | 1/13/2009 1:11:34 PM

   In any mixed-directory implementation, the pain might not be in the migration - tools such as Binary Tree kinda take the pain away - its in the management of the migration, and the management of the directories between the systems.

   In other words, provisioning users correctly in multiple directories is *hard*. Especially hard if one of the new directories is relatively new (Google, for instance).

   This is where a decent Federated Directory infrastructure would work out. We're looking at incorporating Google into our offering, but this will be post lotusphere.. ;-)

   ---* Bill

1. 9  Colin Williams  | 1/13/2009 1:21:34 PM

   They're doing it wrong. We're not so much bigger in terms of users and we won't spend even half of that $900K to keep Notes running for the next five years.

1. 10  tonyo  | 1/13/2009 3:25:22 PM

   Ed,

   I'm shocked beyond belief. You have a whole brand new blog post talking about a competitor and not once did you mention Microsoft!

   ( ok.. actually Tom Austin did kind of mention Office)

   :) see you at Lotusphere

1. 11  mike sullivan  | 1/13/2009 3:45:27 PM

   I can understand the desire to offload email to a service, as the bigger cost is actually managing the anti-spam/ant-virus front end (those numbers were missing in your comparison) and the never-enough-disk back end. Apples-to-apples, I think costs are comparable, and this becomes an 'I don't want to worry about it' decision. Those kinds of decisions inherently hurt in years to come.

   Having lived on Notes, Exchange and now Gmail as my corporate email service, I will make an observation that Gmail's 'Labels' feature, which resembles Notes' views concept, does not scale when you get into the many-thousand message / multi-year mailboxes we live on in real jobs. It's a pain to live with, and you have to switch to a search paradigm to find things (gee, it's from Google).

   They'll be back...life is not better on the other side, and people will complain about things they can't do anymore.

   Besides, who runs Notes for just email? What a waste!

1. 12  Mike Robinson http://www.invcs.com | 1/13/2009 6:35:52 PM

   Don't you think that gmail will get better? I am assuming the gmail offering includes gtalk as well. Google has come out of noo where and is on the verge of attempting to compete with IBM and Microsoft. I don't think there's any doubt that there are issues the real question is how much of a threat they will be in the next two years.

1. 13  Ed Brill http://www.edbrill.com | 1/13/2009 6:43:49 PM

   @12 I am not discounting them as a market competitor. Right now I think it is more on paper than reality. Gmail has been around for nearly five years and Google themselves aren't confident enough in it to remove the "beta" label. They have added some services but it hasn't been a revolution.

1. 14  Bill Geimer  | 1/13/2009 10:07:32 PM

   When you run Notes or Exchange or Groupwise, companies can state correctly that you email account is corporate property / a corporate asset and wholly belongs to the firm.

   Can one truly and for that matter, legally make the same statement when the account, its security, backups, etc. are out in the cloud, which is little more than an pseudonym for some other corporation's network, servers, and operational staff.

   Would SEC compliance and Sorbanes-Oxley compliance even be possible?

   And most important, would iPhones work?

1. 15  Mike Lazar  | 1/13/2009 10:55:50 PM

   @14 - I'm honestly surprised that people still have this notion that hosted services have less security or compliance. The fact is, hosted/cloud services are more secure and more compliant than most in-house applications. Why? Because that's the hosting provider's job. It's all they do. You host 500, 5000, 50,000 seats? Great. I host over 1,000,000. It's my core business to be more secure and more reliable. As for compliance, it's actually looked upon favorably by the SEC and other regulatory agencies to have a 3rd party involved. It also offers the client some insulation. It is contracted that we are in charge of your environment. Based on the policies set forth in the contract, the 3rd party will execute and be responsible for the data and its integrity. If you fall under an order, the regulators come to the 3rd party for the information, with you aware of what is being done. If something is missing, it's the 3rd party's responsibility to find it and rectify the situation.

   Now, if you want to host your own infrastructure, that's your choice. There are a myriad of reasons to do so, and I haven't touched on any of them here. But the argument about security and compliance being a reason to avoid cloud services does not hold water. If anyone wants to discuss this, you know where to find me.

   Cheers -- Mike

1. 16  Michael  | 1/14/2009 1:29:35 AM

   Each time I hear about Gmail, the one thing I think about is "how horrible this application looks like"...I can't imagine what would have been said if Lotus had come with such a - maybe productive for personnal usage - but so weird and outdated UI.

   Another big concern for me about security, without being paranoid but simply realist, is not the security at the backup etc level but the fact that a company, owned by some people now and maybe others tomorrow, can crawl my company data or provide crawling to others...

1. 17  Ben Poole http://benpoole.com | 1/14/2009 4:06:43 AM

   Just to be clear here, gmail != Google Apps for Domains. And Google Apps for Domains is actually pretty damn good for a "beta".

   More to the point, Ed lays out the arguments clearly and concisely, so what was their IBM account manager playing at? Oh, but then they're a 500 user shop...

1. 18  Nathan T. Freeman http://nathan.lotus911.com | 1/14/2009 6:57:38 AM

   "with zero migration and retraining costs... "

   Does that mean that IBM's hosted messaging services will accept the company's existing server names, IP configuration, certificate structure and entire directory in a package with a bow? I somehow doubt that. So the cost is higher than zero -- though probably lower than a platform switch.

   The CIO certainly didn't think that staying with Notes was zero cost. From the article: "...due largely to the costs associated with a mandatory Lotus upgrade for Hamilton Beach Brands Inc. this year." Did IBM offer to pick up the tab for moving their users from 6.5 to a supported version?

   "I guarantee we could have upgraded this customer to Notes/Domino 8, on-premise or hosted, for a lot less than their projected costs." Their projected cost for their own upgrade? Undoubtedly. Their projected cost for Gmail services? No way. The cost of Notes licensing ALONE is almost exactly what they pay Gmail for the full service option. From their perspective, it's as if they renewed their software licenses and had an infrastructure to run it thrown in for free!

   But the real question, Ed, is why did the midmarket CIO pick Google over IBM hosting if this financial analysis is accurate? Did he even consider IBM hosting? If he did, did he reach the same conclusion that I did: that it would cost $240,000 over 5 years for the minimum level of service? That's almost twice as much.

   He doesn't have to be irrational or ignorant to make this decision. He just has to anticipate that the risk of migrating his users to Gmail is less than the cost of the service itself, since your proposed alternative costs twice as much. And it's not like Gmail is going to sit still for the next 5 years. Given their rollout model, they'll ship improvements in service levels, features and new functionality repeatedly over the next 5 years, often on a nightly basis.

   If you could work with a vendor who cost half of the market competition, had a good reputation, and has no physical plant investment requirements to work with them -- would you take a shot with them for 12 months and see what happened? If they delivered, you saved 50%. If they don't, you have a zero-infrastructure migration to the next competitive offering that costs twice as much.

   I'd take that bet.

   What HBBI won't be able to do is stabilize on an older version. Which means they won't be able to integrate with anything else in their environment. They'll be as dependent on Google as companies were on AT&T in the 80s, except they'll be dependent on the phone company, too. "We're the phone company. We don't care. We don't have to."

1. 19  jimmy bracco http://www.lotus911.com | 1/14/2009 7:08:05 AM

   So Im wondering, did they use one of IBM's most "premiere" business partners, Binary Tree's fancy new tool to move them over?

   { Link }

   I believe they were just asked to join the new BP council for Lotus yesterday as a founding member (no offense BobB)

1. 20  Ed Brill http://www.edbrill.com | 1/14/2009 7:34:10 AM

   @19 Jimmy, I'd like to take that discussion offline.

1. 21  Nathan T. Freeman http://nathan.lotus911.com | 1/14/2009 7:43:37 AM

   @18 - Sorry, I left something out. If they have to renew their Notes licenses, then the minimum cost from IBM is $12.50/mn/user. Or $150/user/year.

   That's a %200 price jump. For a cost-conscious company of 500 people.

   Mind you, the difference in absolute terms is $250,000 over 5 years. So the real question is: given 500 people, what's their average cost per man-hour, and what's the difference in man-hours between the two user experiences (Notes 8.5 vs. GAPE) over 5 years? Because IBM isn't competing on price here, so they has to be a bottom-line advantage on the user experience. Otherwise, the smart, rational choice is to dump Notes every time.

1. 22  Ed Brill http://www.edbrill.com | 1/14/2009 7:47:42 AM

   @21 or to continue running on premises.

1. 23  Jeff Gilfelt http://jeffgilfelt.com | 1/14/2009 7:59:42 AM

   @18 - "What HBBI won't be able to do is stabilize on an older version. Which means they won't be able to integrate with anything else in their environment."

   Hardly. I have found the Google data services APIs to be extremely stable. Even the deprecated version 1.0 of the Google Apps provisioning API still works today.

1. 24  Nathan T. Freeman http://nathan.lotus911.com | 1/14/2009 9:43:00 AM

   @23 - Really? Because I heard from a Google Productivity Apps developer that they completely refactored their API about a week ago, breaking a sizable number of demos that were in progress.

   @22 - I must have missed that. The cost for Notes license renewal is almost identical on a per-user basis for a 500-user company as the outsourcing of the entire infrastructure to Google. HBBI would pay about $125,000 just in licensing costs, wouldn't they? So they still have to cover all their costs of servers, rollout, maintenance, etc, for an entire Domino infrastructure.

   Look, don't misunderstand -- clearly there's somethings out of whack with the case study. For instance "...buying several servers (iSeries or Wintel) for Hamilton Beach field offices..." Why would they have to get premises servers if they're running Notes, but can centralize servers to the cloud if they're using Google? Notes should be more bandwidth efficient if they're replicating to clients.

   One FTE for 500 users is a pretty good ratio, IMO, so there's probably not a lot of conserve there.

   The Spam filter is a good consideration, but mostly because it seems to be a headache for anyone on the planet besides Chris Linfoot to reliably filter spam with Domino out of the box.

   Archiving and retention is also a real concern for them, and Google's answers to that are likely way better out of the box than Domino. Given that IBM's response to this requirement has historically been "buy an appliance" or "implement CommonStore," I'm not sure that the answer is going to get any better over time.

   Look, HBBI is a midmarket customer. All these numbers do a great job of illustrating how IBM isn't priced competitively in that space. Isn't that what the Foundations team is supposed to resolve?

1. 25  Ed Brill http://www.edbrill.com | 1/14/2009 10:14:25 AM

   The renewal for Notes is not $50/user/year. At list it is $40/user/year for Notes collab...$29/user/year for Notes for Messaging. Those both include a client and offline support, neither of which are in the Google offering.

1. 26  Ben Poole http://benpoole.com | 1/14/2009 10:43:03 AM

   @25 fair enough, but there's no incremental cost in going offline with a client and Google is there? For example, I use mail.app with my Google-based email. The only "cost" to me is the disk-space for those emails, which I'd have with a Notes client too.

   Of course, the $40 per head cost includes a whole lot more than email, and there's the value for Notes, which we all know and appreciate. But just as Lotus Notes > email, likewise Google Apps for domains.

1. 27  bgm  | 1/14/2009 10:54:51 AM

   There are many other factors that were not included in this particular article on their migration. For example, Google is providing IM (with external presence for AOL) bundled as part of their cost (compared to the midmarket customer maintaining a ST Gateway as well as a ST server). It also provides Google Sites (to replace QuickPlace) as part of their cost. Combined with the included spam filtering (arguably one of the best in the industry), legal discovery options, and ability to handle large files (doesn't Hosted Notes have a 1gb max per mailfile?) this just makes sense. In addition, this isn't just a dollars game, either. Obviously, they have defined a lower cost solution that meets their needs.

   Also, the orig article is stating that by switching to google, their expenditure over 5 years will simply be the $50/year/user. The $900k was for upgrades, labor, iseries investments, etc. that will no longer take place. So the projected $33/user/month cost for Google is incorrect. The more appropriate number is approx $5/user/month.

1. 28  Ed Brill http://www.edbrill.com | 1/14/2009 11:02:13 AM

   $33.33 was not a reference to the Google cost, but the projected Notes cost. $33.33 is pretty high-end for Notes operational costs today, especially with Domino 8.5 dropping costs by 40%+.

   Again, $5/user/month is no way the fully loaded operational cost for the Google deployment. You can't reduce labor to zero unless you are dropping helpdesk, compliance, data connectivity, and directory management. Then there's the lack of a client -- fine for some, but not for someone like me who lives in airports and hotels and places where I'll be spending way too much time trying to get connected (if it is available at all).

1. 29  Edwin Kanis  | 1/14/2009 11:13:57 AM

   The question is again...is it really about the money?

1. 30  bgm  | 1/14/2009 11:16:29 AM

   @28 Understood regarding the $33.33. I read that a different way from how it was written. Yes it is a high cost for internal Domino, but this is a shop running multiple iSeries boxes (for whatever reasons they have). And from what I understand, also a ST and ST Gateway, and QP environment that will also be replaced as part of this Google migration. I am sure those servers/licenses contributed to the costs.

   @28 Regarding the labor, I've run GA Premier, and I just don't see much of a labor cost, especially if this shop was already efficient enough to run Domino on only a single FTE. In regards to the other costs, I think you are correct... I think several of those cost factors go away, or to a negligible amt.

   I believe Lotus is on the right track with hosted services. I wish they had started Hosted Notes years ago (not 3rd party hosted, LOTUS hosted), and maybe by this time, their costs and offerings would be comparable, or maybe even more impressive than Google. But for the moment, it appears to be a game of catching up.

1. 31  Keith Brooks http://www.vanessabrooks.com | 1/14/2009 11:30:03 AM

   500 users, and only mail and they had 6!? people working on it? And they took THE server down for maintenance every month! Notice they say:

   "his team took down email once a month for maintenance, "

   So only one server? no cluster and what is the BS about needing to buy more servers? If your server is that old spend a few grand a get a new one. It's not $900K.

   Then use the original as your cluster so you don't have to take mail down in the future.

   So what are they really saving? Licensing? Electric for one server? because nothing else makes sense from this. They will end up increasing bandwidth most likely if they haven't yet as well. Imagine 500 people pulling down their email all at the same time at 9am,1pm and 4:45?

   But hey it got him his bonus for saving money.

   We could provide management of their infrastructure and make it more robust for what they are paying Google, possibly even at a lower cost, if that was even the issue at all, which I doubt.

1. 32  Dan Lynch  | 1/14/2009 11:33:22 AM

   Anyone beyond SMB's thinking Gmail is the right thing to do to save $$ or provide a secure and trusted repository for the #1 source of private company information (mail) they hold, is not looking where they should be, and can't do the math if they are. Once large companies are involved in litigation following the new Federal Rules for Civil Procedure that went into effect in December 2006, the cost of doing email discovery for one case with an internal mail system, let alone externally-hosted mail, will realize that the expected cost savings are not there. The costs for extraction, searches and legal holds for internal or external systems are astronomical, and the complications about chain of custody, security, trustworthiness (all of which equate to higher costs when dealing with lawyers and discovery) and many others with external email, make external much, much more costly in a discovery context. The $$ spent on discovery in a large enterprise can and do easily dwarf expeditures for maintaining internal systems. Game changers, essentially.

   Anyone in that category who trusts Google with their private corporate data needs to read this { Link } . With no assurance of any privacy being the mantra of the G-snoops, for example in the case linked above where they feel they are justified to drive up Ed's driveway, on a private street in suburban Chicago for example, I do not know one lawyer I work with here who would even consider them for anything including a personal home email account.

   The costs of maintaining email systems in large companies need to include these kinds of indirect costs and security issues and quantify all of that while doing cost comparisons.

1. 33  Nathan T. Freeman http://nathan.lotus911.com | 1/14/2009 11:46:11 AM

   @27 - Now that's an interesting take. Run the numbers from the other side.

   Google is going to provide email, federated IM, productivity apps, spam filtering, retention & discovery process controls, and Google Sites for 500 people. And for this, they will bill less than $2500/month.

   That's the full revenue stream for Google? $30K/ year!?!? Less than 0.5 FTE for a competent administrator!??!?

   I call BS. Either HBBI will get consumer-quality service (we don't care. we don't have to.) or Google loses money hand-over-fist every time they close one of these deals. Even with economies of scale the size of Google's, that's just a ridiculous proposition.

   How much power does HBBI get as a customer in that case, too? I mean, does Google really give a crap if they lose a $30,000/year revenue stream? It's going to be interesting the first time that CIO wants to choke someone at Google and hears "Okay, migrate away. Good bye."

1. 34  bgm  | 1/14/2009 11:47:32 AM

   @31 Here's the math... one full time employee (FTE) costing the company 80k/yr (including healthcare, etc.) is 400k over 5 years. The remaining 500k is easily used up by Notes licensing, replacing iSeries (have you ever PRICED an iSeries? We are not talking about WinTel here), as well as all the upgrade efforts, training efforts as Lotus makes changes. The 900k is not far off base at all for 5yrs, for a company running multiple iSeries boxes.

   @32 Google provides a comprehensive eDiscovery search tool, that is actually very robust if you've used it. Minimal customization, integrated, pretty nice. In terms of your data privacy, it is up to each company to analyze and determine who they trust. Some persons will never trust anyone external to the company with their data. That is their right.

1. 35  bgm  | 1/14/2009 11:51:42 AM

   @31 Here's the math... one full time employee (FTE) costing the company 80k/yr (including healthcare, etc.) is 400k over 5 years. The remaining 500k is easily used up by Notes licensing, replacing iSeries (have you ever PRICED an iSeries? We are not talking about WinTel here), as well as all the upgrade efforts, training efforts as Lotus makes changes. The 900k is not far off base at all for 5yrs, for a company running multiple iSeries boxes.

   @32 Google provides a comprehensive eDiscovery search tool, that is actually very robust if you've used it. Minimal customization, integrated, secure. In terms of your data privacy, it is up to each company to analyze and determine who they trust. Some persons will never trust anyone external to the company with their data. That is their right.

1. 36  bgm  | 1/14/2009 11:57:06 AM

   @33 May or may not be a positive revenue stream for Google. For all we know they take a loss on this. We do know, however, that Google's cash machine is in their search ads revenue. It wouldn't surprise me if they didn't take a small loss on Google Apps, unless it's leveraging untapped resources acquired under different business segments. I've never seen their revenue stream broken down... would probably be interesting to see.

1. 37  Dan Lynch  | 1/14/2009 12:24:03 PM

   @35 Search tools are a good start presumably, but they are only one small slice of the e-discovery picture for a large corporation. Things like the ability to implement legal holds, smtp capture, general retention management, static and immutable copies of mailboxes, user-archived mail access, data isolation and extraction, data production, integration with legal case management tools, access by 3rd parties, chain of custody and many more are all involved and critically important to the process. I know these things in great detail because I've been in the middle of it, up to my neck, for the past 2 years.

   Does Google provide 30(b)(6)experts, ie people that can talk broadly and specifically to the companies practices (Google and the company being hosted) in many areas inside and outside of data preservation and legal hold process? That's a hairy thing to do, even for someone who works for the company involved, let alone a 3rd party. I'd be interested to see if a Google can do that, and if so, what the costs are.

   The cost and complexity of trying to meet the incredibly involved requirements under the FRCP, would be very, very costly, and extraordinarily difficult with any hosted offering from anyone. The burdens-- all on the defendants-- and penalties of non-compliance with the FRCP [jail time and large fines-- with precedent and lawyers in jail already], to preserve, protect and produce any and all information have created a dynamic where all cases will require this action, if for nothing else than to burn $$ to make settlement more attractive vs the cost of discovery. Lawyers who prefer beds without bars, and roomates who are not felons, will push back as much as possible on moving data outside.

   Yah, some persons will never trust anyone, but if you know about the rules and have lived this, and know a thing or two about Google, they'd be somewhere low on the list of potential people to handle anything that is sensitive, private data. They seem to think they have the right to drive up a private street, and into a private driveway, and take and post pictures for the masses, and feel that is not an invasion of privacy, nor trespassing, and they vigorously defend that practice so you and I can use the 360 view. I'm not so sure they'd feel that examining my data housed on their mail environment is such a big deal when they are OK with physically trespassing twice, and then posting the results of that illegal activity.

1. 38  Rob McDonagh http://www.CaptainOblivious.com | 1/14/2009 1:00:03 PM

   @37 Repeating the example about "street view" doesn't make it more persuasive. Google's position on privacy is nowhere near that simple. Or have you forgotten that they fought the federal government to keep people search queries private (the only company to do so)?

   I think you're right about the discovery situation, but I'd be interested in hearing a response from one of the hosting providers. These questions aren't unique to Google, after all.

1. 39  Kevin Mort http://www.theglobalmind.com | 1/14/2009 2:10:53 PM

   @31 - Except that the price for upgrading i has been steadily decreasing. Yes it is generally more than Windows, but then again I can run a metric ton more on it than I can with Windows.

   Personal platform preference, nothing's for everyone.

1. 40  Dan Lynch  | 1/14/2009 4:27:53 PM

   @38, Absolutely, google's general position on privacy isn't that simple, you're right. However, from the perspective of a corporation with FRCP obligations considering hosted Gmail, Google's approach to privacy of user data is even simpler, as directly reflected in the Google Apps privacy policy:

   { Link }

   "Google Apps is offered by Google in conjunction with your domain administrator and that administrator may have access to your account information including your email. Specifically, subject to your domain administrator's privacy policies, your domain administrator may:"....

   "Access or retain information stored as part of your account, including your email, contacts and other information;"

   The words "access or retain" would never pass contract review; the idea that they could actually do that would never be approved by groups responsible for litigation.

   If one were to host with them and somehow overcome that language and its implications for chain of custody and other legal issues, the additional cost burden of a 4 or 5 way ediscovery process, on an hourly basis by expensive firms that do that work, would go up further, and give plaintiffs another tactic to drive up costs and influence settlement negotiations by doing so. The pervasiveness of litigation combined with the really dramatic additional burdens and costs for ediscovery under the FRCP make external hosting very difficult for some companies.

   Of course those of us with Domino in house, even without the legal archiving tools that make it easier (although more costly initially) have a leg up on Exchange shops in doing ediscovery with native domino capabilities, at a cost point as low as possible { Link } Although not easy, capabilities and cost-benefit like that with Domino inside, reinforce Ed's assertion regarding relative costs of hosting, and they continue to return solid value for the business.

1. 41  Keith Brooks http://lotustech.blogspot.com | 1/14/2009 6:58:00 PM

   @35, who needs an i series for 500 mail users?! And you wonder why they claim hardware would kill them. Anything on earth, even my laptop could handle 500 users(okay it would need an extra network slot or 2).

   Plus the admin is NOT going away. Google will do their admin? ROTFLMAO!

   @39 Kevin, I know the i series is a great box, and if that is their defined path, then why are they complaining about it? It's not like Exchange where you only have one option? They have too many choices with Domino, it just all stinks of an executive on the run.

1. 42  Nathan T. Freeman http://nathan.lotus911.com | 1/14/2009 10:08:03 PM

   @36 - The simple motive for the question... how long until your GAPE users are subjected to targeted ads? Or until your enterprise data is collected and mined for whatever purpose Google thinks of?

   I mean, if they're losing money on every hosting agreement (and if they're SLAs allow a customer to so much as pick up the phone, they must be) then they must have an alternative revenue stream in mind. What if Google built demographic profiles of your employees? What if they opened an internet brokerage house and allowed traders to see spreadsheet trends inside GAPE? What if they operated a hedge fund and monitored emails for keywords? They do, after all, have the single best search product on the planet with completely proprietary protocols.

   I supposed I've jumped fences a bit from the "I can see why someone would choose to use GAPE" attitude. But my point is: if you look at the numbers, it makes sense for the customer, but it doesn't make sense for Google. So what the hell are they actually doing?

1. 43  Colin Williams  | 1/15/2009 1:44:00 PM

   They're doing it all wrong. Who sold them iSeries for 500 users?

   IBM need to do some case studies on companies that are eeking out a healthy & reliable Notes/Domino existence "on the cheap".

1. 44  Timothy Briley  | 1/15/2009 3:28:50 PM

   @43 - Um, that would be the very small state agency that I work for. Although we number less than 50, in serving the public we process a lot of data and the AS/400 really meets our needs.

   Among the reasons for using an AS/400 is that once you get it up and running, it's rock solid. We have one part-time AS/400 admin/developer and don't need more because it never crashes and rarely needs patching or trouble-shooting.

   The main downside to it for us is the lack of 3rd party Lotus Notes products that will run on an AS/400.

1. 45  Colin Williams  | 1/15/2009 6:51:50 PM

   @44 - yes, I understand that. We use AS400 in a specific part of our business for similar reasons.

   My point is that you don't HAVE to run Domino on iSeries to get rock solid performance/uptime.

1. 46  Martin Veitch http://www.cio.co.uk | 1/19/2009 7:19:13 AM

   The Gartner gentleman says he can't name an enterprise that's switched from Office to Google.

   The biggest switch I have seen is Telegraph Media Group in the UK, publisher of the Daily and Sunday Telegraph etc.