IBM has partnered with Indian tech company HCL to maintain the life of Domino and Notes platforms. HCL Technologies previously took on Rational and Tivoli products from IBM in 2016.
The Notes platforms include the instant messaging SameTime platform, as well as the Web-ified version of the Notes front-end, Verse. Deployments of these can be either on-premise, in the cloud, or delivered via a hybrid cloud.
IBM has written a blog post on their social business blog about their future investment and work with HCL (IBM Announces Investment in Notes Domino Version 10 and Beyond). They have also added posted about recruiting critical Notes users to become part of the product development cycle to take Domino towards 2025, via Domino 10 in 2018.
The Register in their article (IBM offloads Notes and Domino to India’s HCL Technologies) mentions the video from Ed Brill, VP of Product Management, IBM Collaboration Solutions, IBM. The article indicates that although Notes is used by many today, it needs to catch-up to maintain its market position.
Notes is a substantial integration of mail client and database front-end. This combination makes Verse’s web-client look lighter and easier to use, focused as it is on mail and calendar only. There are hundreds of Notes databases in use in many companies, as they were created without much coding. Even with an API available (C API programming for Lotus Notes/Domino), integration hasn’t occurred. There must be a lot of free-form data stored in these, so this might be where IBM get’s its 80% figure for dark data.
80% of data is “dark data” meaning it’s invisible and not easily usable to businesses. Take control of your dark data! #IBMBCUKI @IBMBDAUK
— IBM United Kingdom (@IBM_UK_news) October 12, 2016
Using HCL’s partnership to develop Notes, IBM is hoping to deliver at lower cost, using more people, quicker. Domino and Notes may live to face the conundrum of Notes 10 or Notes X.
(No, he’s not really reading a script from the laptop screen).
