Tom Witkin of The SpeedWork Company (at http://www.speedwork.com), meanwhile, believes there absolutely is growth in the market. "Domino remains an ideal platform for collaboration, especially where sharing information has a specific focus. While there are myriad alternatives for general collaboration, if that process needs to happen within the context of a specific application--for example, a task-centric application like SpeedWork--then Domino provides the ideal platform."

Mats Ingelborn of SolutionPlanet (at http://www.solutionplanet.com) believes we will see little major growth in these difficult economic times. "However, we do see growth in the use of additional Domino based products by the installed base that increase the ROI on the customer's initial investment."

Phil Guirl, President of Stonebridge Holistic Consulting Agency, Ltd. (at http://www.stonebridgeholistic.com) runs a company that produces and sells an application that runs exclusively on the Lotus Notes and Domino platform, and he reports replacing MS Exchange environments with Notes and Domino at SMBs throughout the country. "There is growth to be had for IBM in selling its Lotus Notes and Domino software when there are real world applications that run on it. Unfortunately, IBM doesn't understand how to market anything but big iron and big-iron products, so whether there is growth or not doesn't matter. IBM will eventually pull the plug on Lotus Notes and Domino."

Peter Hoffmann, Managing Director at SoftVision Development GmbH (at http://www.svd-online.com) believes that "More than half of the Notes license base is not yet using Notes for true workflow applications. That leaves a significant (US dollar) figure in business to still be won in this market."

Andrew Stuart is Managing Director of Touchdown Systems Design (at http://www.touchdown.com.au) in Melbourne Australia. He is also a Contributing Editor for DominoPower Magazine. According to Stuart, the Domino market has been reinvigorated by the release of ND6. "Domino 5 sorely needed to be brought into the 21st century, and it seems to me that Lotus has done an admirable job of doing so with version 6. Domino 6's XML and XSL features appear to be well thought out and highly functional. The many other improvements--such as greater control over HTTP, shared script libraries, and Javascript script libraries--all contribute towards making Domino 6 a compelling Internet application development platform and a worthwhile upgrade."

Stuart continues, "Whether version 6 is enough to encourage growth in the Domino market is another matter completely. IBM did a lot of damage to Domino when it suggested that Domino would be phased out, and although IBM has backed away from those remarks, most Lotus software professionals that I know believe that Domino is a dying technology. The only way that IBM could turn this around is if it were to make loud, public, and believable commitments to Domino over a long period of time and back it up with action. It appears to me that many organizations are planning to phase out Domino primarily because there is the perception that IBM does not stand by Domino as a product."