Lotus Notes Wants to Bloom Again

But here is the big news: Lotus Notes is making a comeback. Well, sort of.
Analyst firm Gartner placed Notes’ worldwide licence market share in 2007 at 40 percent versus 48 percent for Exchange. (Gartner refused to comment for this story with updated figures).
This does not mean Lotus Notes is about to upstage Outlook. In an interview last year to Computerworld, Tom Austin, a Gartner vice president and research fellow, said, “When it comes to actual usage, Outlook is three times bigger than Notes.” Austin’s comment reflects the fact that software companies like IBM and Microsoft usually “cajole” their customers into buying more licences than they need — hence the difference between software sold versus software used. But the key point is that IBM has put some juice back in Notes.

The Comeback
“Three or four years ago, we did not have the sexiest or coolest front-end around. But we invested heavily in hiring companies to help us redesign it, taking the lead in usability. We partnered companies like RIM, LinkedIn and Apple to bring their capabilities to Notes. Today we have 150 million licensees globally, up from 145 million last year. And lead analysts like Gartner have started taking a very different view on Notes — standing up at a conference last year and saying that Notes is the email client for the future,” says David Farrell, a vice president with IBM’s Lotus division.

Having lost the email battle to Microsoft’s Exchange, Farrell and IBM are now positioning Notes as a broader business communications solution that combines email, instant messaging, social networks and video conferencing.

One of the companies in India that seems to have bought into IBM’s vision for Notes is Asian Paints. Manish Chokshi, the company’s chief information officer, says his company picked Notes over Exchange for its email needs about three years ago primarily because it’s “excited about the longer term direction around the Lotus portfolio on collaboration.” Chokshi also says his employees haven’t cribbed too much on Notes’ usability, at least to him, because many of them run the latest version of Notes, 8.5, which has a “revamped and contemporary UI”.

IBM is also realising the value in not trying to solve all its customer’s problems by itself, but instead allowing partners to write new applications that plug functionality gaps in Notes or add newer features altogether. For instance Chennai-based Synaptris has tried to solve one of the most burning issues faced by Notes users — the difficulty or often, the impossibility, of sorting, archiving, prioritising and searching large amounts of email. Its Notes add-on, “FewClix”, allows users to combine multiple archive files into a single virtual one, search for text strings across tens of thousands of emails and prioritise emails around meetings or deliverables.

Farrell says IBM is currently working with over 10,000 partners like Synaptris around the world, who add value to its core applications. “Without them, we could not have survived 25 years,” he says.

While IBM is trying to protect its existing market share against Microsoft in advanced economies, in countries like India, it feels there’s enough of an SME market for it to sell quite a fair bit more. “India is a hugely underserved market; there are millions who still do not have any enterprise collaboration. We’re also trying to get email to government departments like the Railways, like one for every TTE [Train Ticket Examiner],” says Farrell. “Unfortunately IBM has the persona of a big company. It still sees us as an SME even at 5,000 plus employees,” says Chokshi.

But if IBM has to win the email battle, it will need the support of many more SMEs — small and big.

“We were unrivalled for a long time. It was only in the last eight or 10 years that Microsoft came in as a big player, investing heavily, and with the muster and resources to rival us. But we’ve been holding our market share in the 40s for the last four to five years. Today if we don’t become more vocal, people will start believing the perception,” says Farrell. Nobody should hold their breath for that though. Well tried though, Lotus Notes!