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Businesses IBM Software

After 23 Years, IBM Sells Off Lotus Notes (techcrunch.com) 105

Posted by BeauHD from the passing-the-baton dept.
"IBM has agreed to sell select software products to HCL Technologies," writes Slashdot reader virtig01. "Included among these is everyone's favorite email and calendaring tool, Lotus Notes and Domino." TechCrunch reports: IBM paid $3.5 billion for Lotus back in the day. The big pieces here are Lotus Notes, Domino and Portal. These were a big part of IBM's enterprise business for a long time, but last year Big Blue began to pull away, selling the development part to HCL, while maintaining control of sales and marketing. This announcement marks the end of the line for IBM involvement. With the development of the platform out of its control, and in need of cash after spending $34 billion for Red Hat, perhaps IBM simply decided it no longer made sense to keep any part of this in-house. As for HCL, it sees an opportunity to continue to build the Notes/Domino business. "The large-scale deployments of these products provide us with a great opportunity to reach and serve thousands of global enterprises across a wide range of industries and markets," C Vijayakumar, president and CEO at HCL Technologies, said in a statement announcing the deal.
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After 23 Years, IBM Sells Off Lotus Notes More

After 23 Years, IBM Sells Off Lotus Notes

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  • It looks like (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Windows is finally done

  • These idiots can't decide what they want to be. Lotus Notes? Jesus...I thought that piece of crap died off years ago.

    • At least read the subject if not the summary or the article.. "after 23 years...."

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by jwhyche ( 6192 )

      Same here. I've not thought of lotus notes in years. The first, and last time, I was forced to use it was 20 years ago or so.

  • Indian Business Machine (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Not much fits within their "make money, not stuff" vision anymore. They'll be selling mainframes next, but probably keep research for a while, to generate more patents, until they run out of Chinese grad students. Then they'll just coast the rest of the way out.

  • In a previous incarnation the company I worked for used Lotus Notes. What an absolute disaster. I think IBM is very lucky to palm this off to get $1.8 billion for it after paying $3.5 billion those many years ago. Good work, IBM. I wonder how much they lost over the years trying to maintain it.

    • Since IBM uses Notes internally for all its employees, I suspect that a large chunk of that money is going right back to the buyer to pay for licensing.

      • Unlikely... I'd imagine that IBM almost certainly will move to the cloud for mail and groupware. They actually did more or less dump PCs for Macs over the last few years. It seems only logical that they could also move their groupware pretty quickly.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Kjella ( 173770 )

      In a previous incarnation the company I worked for used Lotus Notes. What an absolute disaster. I think IBM is very lucky to palm this off to get $1.8 billion for it after paying $3.5 billion those many years ago. Good work, IBM. I wonder how much they lost over the years trying to maintain it.

      Lotus Notes is sorta a cross-breed between Excel macros and MS Access. You're going to hate it for all the reasons IT people hate the latter too, but for the time I actually saw some kinda impressive business applications which somehow worked and delivered value. Our perception is usually skewed by the fact that we're only called in when it's become a Frankenstein's monster nobody really can understand or maintain or doesn't work right. I can already see the pattern, we've worked on a very ad hoc basis even

    • Re:Used notes an a company (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Tablizer ( 95088 ) on Friday December 07, 2018 @08:29PM (#57769370) Journal

      the company I worked for used Lotus Notes. What an absolute disaster.

      I used Lotus Notes at one place I contracted at years ago and loved it! I even started building an open-source version (got side-tracked by life, though), and it inspired an idea for "Dynamic Relational" so that columns (attributes) don't have to be hard-wired in RDBMS ahead of time. We have dynamic programming languages, why not dynamic RDBMS also? Create-On-Write, no DBA.

      One can make quicks forms in Notes for tracking projects and systems. You could then look up details based on different parameters (query-by-example). Every message (form instance) had a unique ID, and you could refer to other forms via that ID alone. "See #12345 for more..." It's what SharePoint could have been if they didn't F it up.

      Our implementation did have a glitch whereby it occasionally lost messages. I don't know if the product was outright buggy, or if the system admin didn't bother running the cleaning step often enough.

      One of these days I may finish my open-source version. There are already some out there, but I don't like their feature set and UI.

      • haha... I just read your paper on Factor Tables.

        Let me just say that you're a disturbed person in general. You like Notes which is clearly against the current and you are implementing something closer to a finite response filter than a neural net for AI... you really like to swim upstream :)

        P.S.
        I've used a combination of your approach of "factor tables" and neural nets for decades. You're onto something. I have to admit though that convnets have proven extremely interesting to me in recent times. I don't li

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Tablizer ( 95088 )

          You like Notes which is clearly against the current

          Every org has systems, projects, customers, etc. for which they need to track unstructured or semi-structured info about. For highly structured stuff, RDBMS or domain software is often used. For lightly structured stuff, file systems or email are usually used. File-systems and email don't cross-reference attributes/categories very well.

          But there's not much in-between these high-structure and low-structure tools. That's where Notes-like products come in ha

      • Notes was the wiki well ahead of its time.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by antdude ( 79039 )

      Ditto. My former employer went to MS products. Haha.

  • At least they bought Lotus this time instead of their usual partner with the company and then waste it's resources till it's dead.

    Real shame just the same. Lotus 123 was a much nicer spreadsheet than excel, their word processor wasn't bad not up to word but it could have been, and notes was far more powerful than Exchange right up to the early 2000s. Be interesting to see what the new owners do with it, I am betting on them mining the existing customer base hard. Once you are on Notes, it's very difficult t

  • Notes was an ugly email system. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by hey! ( 33014 ) on Friday December 07, 2018 @07:01PM (#57768970) Homepage Journal

    But it was a really interesting platform for building cryptographically secure document management systems.

    Email was just one possible application that could be built on that platform; you could also build things like blogging and content and distributed, cooperative workflow management systems on it, complete with strong encryption and cryptographic authentication, including robust features like trust revocation and certificate signing delegation. And this was back in 1990, when people were using Windows 3.0. Active Directory was still ten years in the future, but it was feasible to deploy a system with tens or even hundreds of thousands of users using Notes even then.

    This was also a time of exponential growth in computer adoption, and there were chronic shortages of people with even basic administration skills. It took green administrators weeks of training to learn the basic concepts in crypto and distributed directory management before they could operate even a basic Notes installation,yet Lotus and later IBM tried to position it against Outlook and Exchange.

    It didn't help that Lotus never got its head of its ass when it came to UX, nor did it ever really do a good job of explaining to people the vast scope of collaboration management applications that could be built on Notes.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Greyfox ( 87712 )
      All the Lotus Notes applications had that shitty unpolished feel to them that IBM always brings to the table. You buy a platform from them and they hand you a turd. If you want a shiny turd, you had to polish it yourself. But there was also never a really good way to polish those turds, probably because there never is a really good way to polish a turd. No matter what you do you're going to end up with turd all over you and lucky if you don't smell like that for the rest of your career.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by hey! ( 33014 )

        I agree the system had its limitations, particularly in style. It was still extremely powerful for its time.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Desler ( 1608317 )

          But it's not the 80s or 90s anymore. No one cares that it was better than a bunch of other three-decade-old turds.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by hey! ( 33014 )

            It is still better in many ways than systems people still use. For example if the DNC and RNC were using it, it wouldn't matter that the Russians hacked into their email system. All they'd get is strongly encrypted gibberish.

      • Are you talking about IBM or about SAP?

  • I'm so... (Score:3)

    by AndyKron ( 937105 ) on Friday December 07, 2018 @07:12PM (#57769030)
    Wow. They sold them. I'm so... indifferent.
  • I'm amazed and slightly nostalgic that such a horrible and unfashionable product can still be mentioned on a tech site, wow! What this this mean for the remaining twelve users?!!

  • I Dissent! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by CAOgdin ( 984672 ) on Friday December 07, 2018 @08:15PM (#57769324)

    Already, the Slashdot post today has been overflowing with the complaints of the nay-sayers who never participated in a successful and productive deployment in an organization. I pity their glee.

    Au Contraire, Mon Ami. Domino/Notes was...in the right hands, a very valuable tool for many companies and organizations. I had literally dozens of happy corporate clientele during my Domino/Notes consulting era, because with the right objectives and roll-out it made a powerful tool organizations (usually the larger of those) could use to improve revenues and lower costs. Some of those companies are still using it to this day, and will rue having the owner (and therefore, support, off-shored to India, where good products can sometimes go to die).

    When it was deployed in haste, and everybody got it all at once in a large corporation, it was usually a catastrophe, largely because Lotus, (and even worse, IBM) didn't bother to create an infrastructure AROUND Domino/Notes, and did a relatively poor job of inspiring the cadre of people like me who actually understood the possibilities (although they did give me a lot of leads that led to the success of my consultancy).

    My strategy was simple: DO NOT ROLL IT OUT TO THE BUSINESS. Show them proof, from other companies, so that one small corner of the large corporation could grasp the benefits, and have it deployed properly, to fit a business need and show a benefit to both users and the corporation. It was NOT an "email system," although it had a eMail as part of its' core...a rather good one, that was easily adopted by novices.

    My strategy, developed at DuPont (my first major client) was to find one business unit that was vital to corporate revenues, but having trouble, or excessive costs. An example: One division was hidebound with obsolete, incompatible array of products that people hated to use because it was easier to pick up the phone a make a call; that didn’t require a few days’ of learning time in a fast-moving organization. We replaced their incompatablities with ease of use through feature integration, and they suddenly turned to the new tools with glee. Another application was for all the far-flung Production Managers, who came back to Wilmington (Delaware, corporate HQ) to share solutions to production line efficiency...a couple of times a year. We gave those worldwide employees Notes clients and put the Server in Wilmington, and they began to solve problems more quickly and efficiently (often in days, instead of waiting months), and the results paid for the first years' adoption for the two original projects, including training and the usual unanticipated start-up costs, and showed a net profit. In the second year, other business unit managers were CLAMORING for the Domino/Notes solution; we sorted through them and declined about half, and the other half were successfully served. As of 1995, I know most of them were still being happily relied upon as a problem-solving aid.

    The IBM purchase of Lotus was good for the investors, but IBM stopped evolving it when they bought it. There were the usual updates & versions, of course, (to keep the revenue flowing) but no real effort to broaden the market (e.g., to corporations with far-flung offices, or mid-sized companies verging on growth into the Big Leagues). Once all the major corporations to whom they catered were served, it was just a "maintenance" market, insofar as I could see.

    It will be interesting to watch the acquiring company's sheparding of the product. Will they rely on updates and consulting to existing customers, or will they actually re-scale versions of the products for new markets that are emerging, rather than rely on the revenue from maintenance upgrades? There are large swathes of corporations in the $100M-to-$1B market that could be served, if they choose to revitalize the talent that is still out here, many of whom have long ago retired, and been replaced by people who still need to bridge the "Knowledge Gap" between extant technology and

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by CAOgdin ( 984672 )

      Sorry for the typos and lack of proper syntax in some of the above; the ideas are still there. I was rushing in the final edit to get to the dinner table before my spouse declared it all "too cold to bother!" :-)

      --Carol Anne (aka "Friday")

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Another error I made: I typed "1995" when "2005" was my intent. There is a 20-page brief of Steve Miller's direction of the Domino/Notes deployment posted at ftp://ftp.software.ibm.com/software/solutions/pdfs/g325-1358-00.pdf

        It validates much of what I've described here. And, in discovering that document, I found that I'm in the development team photograph, on Page 5...I'm in the front row.

        --Carol Anne

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Anonymous Coward

          Carol, you are a treasure. Thank you for the experienced and honest insight.

    • largely because Lotus, (and even worse, IBM) didn't bother to create an infrastructure AROUND Domino/Notes

      This is also the reason why no one has properly unseated Exchange / MS Office either. A lot of people focus on the individual functions of the software while ignoring the whole. Then they wonder why it isn't the year of Linux on the desktop.

    • Horseshit. I worked for IBM and even they couldn't make using Lotus notes bearable.

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward

        In fact, that's true. IBM intended Domino/Notes to sell more hardware. They NEVER reached out to the experienced community of competent Developers, Deployers and Roll-out experts who actually made Domino/Notes successful in many corporations. Again, read the IBM promo of the DuPont experience: It actually misses explaining how Steve Miller (lead on the project) collaborated with potential groups of users, to make sure that #1) They had problems for which Domino/Notes was a viable solution, and #2) They

  • Email? Calendar? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    > Included among these is everyone's favorite email and calendaring tool

    And *this* is why the whole thing failed.

    Notes was *never* an email system, it has always been as fairly decent groupware system with a rather crappy email application built on top of it. I suspect, had Lotus (or, later, IBM) totally ditched the email side of it, then then maybe people would have realised what market it was actually meant to serve. Then it *might* have had a chance of success.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by CAOgdin ( 984672 )

      The other flaw was that the original remit was to build a flexible system that could be expanded with specific tools the organization needed to evolve for best results within their own unique environment. Most businesses are so broad in scope that the universality of the Notes client features were considered primary, groups (in the SlashDot emulation!) were second-tier, and most people never tried to develop anything more than simple utilities that could be added to Domino/Notes for maintenance-level tasks

  • Meanwhile, the friggin' US State Department expects you to submit documents using a Lotus-based form while the rest of the world uses Acrobat.

  • This is a good thing as HCL has already been programming for IBM for years and they had taken over development for Notes and Domino recently, IBM had been slow on development with domino/notes for years due to their main focus on Cloud computing, which they tried with Notes/Domino in Bluemix, however that didn't quite work out and a lot of IBM's Notes/Domino customers didn't want to move Notes/Domino to the cloud. HCL has already added Node.js to Domino 10 and they are redoing the client . We've switch
  • Back around 2000 I was working as a PC technician for a Fortune 500 company. We had Notes 4.6 deployed when a particularly nasty virus hit (back in the good old days of Windows 98, I don't think our workstations had NT or 2000 yet). I remember reading the news about companies being brought to their knees by this virus (Melissa?) that were using Outlook/Exchange. Domino never had the same problems with it and we only had a handful of workstations hit and it never spread. For all its ugly ugly UI and UX p

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