Trends in messaging boost demand for Notes, Domino, says Admin2005 keynoter Goyal |
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By Jack Vaughan
18 May 2005 | SearchDomino.com |
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As demands on messaging infrastructure continue to increase, IBM Lotus Domino and Notes are in a position to gain added market traction, IBM's Ambuj Goyal told an audience at the Admin 2005 Conference in Boston.
As he touted the benefits of Lotus Notes and the Sametime IM and Web conferencing platform during his keynote speech, Goyal, general manager of Workplace, Portal and Collaborative Software, pointed to IBM's own experiences in collaborative messaging.
"If Notes and Sametime go down, that is a huge disaster for our organization. [Messaging] is absolutely mission-critical [at IBM]," Goyal said. With IM and e-mail volume growing, issues related to scalability and security have become key factors for messaging systems in all industries, he said.
Meanwhile, IBM released data claiming double-digit growth for Lotus messaging and collaboration products in the first quarter. Goyal noted that IBM had seen increases in Notes seat counts, including Notes applications running on mainframes.
The current IBM Lotus Notes and Domino customer base is set by the company at more than 118 million users. IBM reported double-digit growth in the fourth quarter of 2004, and said that growth continued into Q1 2005 with 11 percent growth for Lotus Software and 17 percent growth for Lotus messaging and collaboration products.
Goyal said that over 90 percent of subscription-paying customers are now on Notes 6.5 and Domino 6.5. A new release (7.0) of Lotus Domino Notes is due this summer.
Admin 2005 attendees cheered when full administration capability from the Mozilla client running on the Linux operating system was shown during the keynote.
"It feels like Lotus is starting to come back," said Goyal, before adding, "It never went away."
Going forward, the company is focusing on performance and server consolidation. CPU requirements for Domino Notes have been reduced, said Goyal, allowing more users to work on less hardware.
In a session that followed Goyal's keynote, Ed Brill, who heads up marketing and sales for Notes and Domino, expounded on that point. He said that Release 7 has taken some bottlenecks out of the 20 million lines of legacy code in Notes/Domino, leading to much improved CPU utilization. He said that Domino 7 was showing 25 percent less CPU usage with no other changes to the server aside from the new code. And since, he noted, that there were still three months before Release 7 was shipping, further improvements were still possible. "This will be a major benefit for organizations looking at server consolidation," he said.
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