IBM's marketing materials focus too much on Notes and Domino as an application platform and at every trade show except the dwindling Lotusphere show one cannot find Notes and Domino -- or any email and messaging solution -- at an IBM booth.

At the same time, the Lotus business partner community is smaller than it once was. In addition to economic and competitive forces, IBM itself has courted Lotus partners to move them to other product lines, principally to WebSphere and Tivoli. The highly successful Lotus Business Partner Program is a thing of the past.

What IBM could do
Nonetheless, IBM has pushed business partners to tackle new markets and to promote Domino over Exchange, but they have not created the kind of buzz that partners need to expand the market and take back market share from Microsoft. It is IBM that should be aggressively taking customers away from Microsoft -- creating momentum -- not merely encouraging partners to do so.

For example, IBM could revitalize its virtually unknown (to IT customers) "Move to Lotus" program with better migration tools, a superior co-existence model, up-to-date whitepapers and customer testimonials, new analyst studies based on the latest version of Domino, and last but not least -- a serious marketing effort.

Move to Lotus hasn't succeeded because it is incomplete; focusing on discounts instead of the competition. To succeed the program has to go much further. IBM has to go out there and get the customers. The current approach relies too heavily on partners to win customers away from Microsoft merely offering discounts and supporting marketing materials.

If IBM wanted to actually beat Exchange with Domino there would have to be a greatly expanded "Move to Lotus 2.0" campaign. It is unrealistic to expect partners to succeed where IBM has failed.

Can Domino do it?
The most obvious question may be whether Domino -- as a product -- is up to the task. The answer is: absolutely!

Unfortunately, the pattern of Lotus inside IBM might be compared to the all too common progression of acquisitions where focus on the core product of the acquired company is lost and whatever momentum the acquired product had before the acquisition simply dissipates under the bureaucracy and politics of a larger entity. If nothing else, it would be fair to say that Notes and Domino have lost momentum in the marketplace.

In the larger picture, the issue is lack of focus on the problem of how to beat the competition, how to beat Exchange with Notes and Domino, rather than focusing almost totally on the larger problem of winning Internet and intranet business with WebSphere and DB2 indirectly (at the expense of Notes and Domino).

This doesn't mean that IBM should expend more resources on Domino versus WebSphere. Based on what products generate revenue and represent a strategic application platform for the future, IBM should be aggressively promoting WebSphere, just as they are. That doesn't mean, however, that Domino can't win new market share.