Microsoft vs. IBM
Microsoft is aggressively pursuing SaaS with its Hosted Messaging and Collaboration (HMC) platform (already version 4.0) which includes Active Directory, Exchange, SharePoint and more. IBM Lotus is far behind Microsoft, in my opinion, and does not seem to have allocated serious resources to address the growing threat to their customer base and to the future economic viability of Lotus Notes and Domino versus rapidly advancing SaaS offerings.

Personally, I don't believe IBM Lotus can compete unless they make radical changes immediately. In fact, based on conversations I've had, I don't think they understand what's happening in messaging and collaboration technology today or what the future direction of messaging and collaboration technology is. In my opinion, IBM Lotus has declined from the preeminent, dominant leader to yet another legacy IBM solution.

It's a sad development from my perspective, considering the once proud and vibrant ecosystem that has gradually withered away on IBM's watch.

I personally believe IBM Lotus has been asleep at the switch -- complacent in their ability to run on big iron -- while the coming revolution has taken shape right under their proverbial noses. Their only dilemma, in my opinion, has been how to gloss over prehistoric Domino applications written in arcane programming languages with a patina of WebSphere and Java. They've made progress on that objective but it is simply irrelevant vis-a-vis what's actually happening in the real world with respect to messaging and collaboration technology, SaaS, and Web 2.0. They just don't get it.

Where the Sun shines
The unexpected 800 pound gorilla of the SaaS new world order may be Sun Microsystems. Sun has more active mailboxes on their platform today than IBM Lotus, Microsoft, and Novell combined. Their products are two orders of magnitude more scalable than Exchange and Domino with active systems of over 10 million users. If you think about the economies of scale for a technology that's two orders of magnitude more scalable, you have to recognize that the words "cannot compete" accurately describe other solutions.

The ISP and telecom market is Sun's backyard. In the future, the vast majority of business users will be on SaaS solutions. The largest companies will realize their own economies of scale through ISP-like solutions implementing the same technologies. Further, the Sun Java Communications Suite ("Comms Suite") software architecture is virtually the same in a single-server system for just a few thousand users up to a multi-million user system. The days of having a server at every geographical site are already behind us. Now, I personally believe, that the technologies designed for that now obsolete paradigm are also heading the way of the dinosaurs.

It was great while it lasted
In the future, if nothing else changes, I personally believe IBM Lotus Notes and Domino will be irrelevant at best, assuming that the products continue to exist. In my view, the most likely scenario is that IBM Lotus will merely try to hang on to its shrinking customer base through a never ending stream of minor point releases that change virtually nothing but that may obscure for a time the fact that the solution is no longer economically viable.

I would expect such efforts to eventually fail, as has happened with all other obsolete technologies in the history of the world. In a battle of replication versus Web 2.0, it's not hard to pick a winner because the world that existed in the 1980s and 1990s is no more.

It was great while it lasted. Domino was the first application server in the world and that's a wonderful fact of history, but another, more current, fact is that Domino never made it into the Web application server category alongside J2EE and .NET based products with SQL databases behind them and state-of-the-art Web servers in front of them.

Domino 8 with DB2 on the back end still doesn't make Domino into a modern application server. Nothing ever will. IBM already has a J2EE application server (WebSphere). Domino didn't make the cut. Now, a few years on we can see the results of IBM's product overlap taking hold in a new and growing market, a market without Notes and Domino.

My advice to Lotus Notes and Domino professionals is to start learning new skills. Technology changes. Get used to it.

Mick Moignard has been working and traveling with Lotus Notes since Release 2.0 in 1991. Mick is a DominoPower Senior Technical Editor and a Principal CLP with Unipart Expert Practices, a Lotus Advanced Partner in the UK. If you want to discuss anything to do with this article, or indeed anything else to do with Notes and Domino, contact Mick at Mick_Moignard@unipart.co.uk. Unipart Expert Practices will also happily discuss any opportunities you may have with any Notes and Domino application development or infrastructure projects you need help with. Unipart Expert Practices can be found at http://www.unipartep.com.