September 11 2009 Friday
Domino is cheaper than Exchange no matter which way you look or how small or big you are
Earlier this week Ed Brill posted on a white paper on messaging TCO published by UK based Applicable. What is interesting about this paper is that the writers are both IBM and Microsoft partners. The theory would then go that these guys have no axe to grind and would be pretty familiar with the TCO of both platforms. I know, I know, this is a yellow tinted blog so I would say that, but that fact by itself is very interesting.
As pointed out from some of the comments on Ed's post, some of the figures published in the report may look astounding to some, but as anyone who has been doing Domino for a while will tell you, compared to other solutions, notably Exchange, Domino is cheaper to operate and own. What we have not really seen lately is a quantitative justification on why Domino has a substantially reduced TCO. Well all know it to be true, but customers rarely take notice of "it just is". Now, IBM and MS have poked various posts and studies at each other over the years,but these have mostly dried up and focus mainly on Domino 7 vs Exchange 2003. They had become a bit "tit-for-tat", like diplomats being expelled from countries. That is another reason I like this white paper.....it is recent and relevant.
Another area that is interesting is that Domino is up to 52% cheaper based on infrastructure and "subsequent user support". Note the "user support"? The bogus claims that Lotus products are more costly to operate and support are simply blown away here.
Add in DR and HA and the savings in favor of Domino are even more pronounced. Just look a the bar chart below that indicates the costs associated with clustered messaging. I had to look twice to even see the IBM costs, as they are that much lower! (both figuratively and quantitatively) And it is not just in one area, it is all areas: support, platform and licenses:
Above diagram from http://www.applicable.com/Documents/Comparative%20TCO%20Analysis%20-The%20Cost%20of%20Availability.pdf
It seems completely un-intuitive that MS, who have a pretty good grasp on the SMB market are so costly to acquire, operate and support. What is more shocking, given the costs, is that far more organizations are not giving MS the boot. The savings when you are on Domino are truly staggering.
I know some readers are thinking, "But what about the cloud". Honestly, if you can live with severe outages that GMail has had over the last year or so then more power to you. Just remember the unemployment lines are long and, right now, jobs are pretty scarce. Besides that, given the numbers above I'd be surprised if the cloud could beat the per user per month costs on at level on a sustained basis.
Thanks to Ed Brill for posting this, and a very special thank you to Applicable for putting some real numbers and quantitative analysis into this white paper. A very, very well done.
As pointed out from some of the comments on Ed's post, some of the figures published in the report may look astounding to some, but as anyone who has been doing Domino for a while will tell you, compared to other solutions, notably Exchange, Domino is cheaper to operate and own. What we have not really seen lately is a quantitative justification on why Domino has a substantially reduced TCO. Well all know it to be true, but customers rarely take notice of "it just is". Now, IBM and MS have poked various posts and studies at each other over the years,but these have mostly dried up and focus mainly on Domino 7 vs Exchange 2003. They had become a bit "tit-for-tat", like diplomats being expelled from countries. That is another reason I like this white paper.....it is recent and relevant.
Another area that is interesting is that Domino is up to 52% cheaper based on infrastructure and "subsequent user support". Note the "user support"? The bogus claims that Lotus products are more costly to operate and support are simply blown away here.
Add in DR and HA and the savings in favor of Domino are even more pronounced. Just look a the bar chart below that indicates the costs associated with clustered messaging. I had to look twice to even see the IBM costs, as they are that much lower! (both figuratively and quantitatively) And it is not just in one area, it is all areas: support, platform and licenses:
Above diagram from http://www.applicable.com/Documents/Comparative%20TCO%20Analysis%20-The%20Cost%20of%20Availability.pdf
It seems completely un-intuitive that MS, who have a pretty good grasp on the SMB market are so costly to acquire, operate and support. What is more shocking, given the costs, is that far more organizations are not giving MS the boot. The savings when you are on Domino are truly staggering.
I know some readers are thinking, "But what about the cloud". Honestly, if you can live with severe outages that GMail has had over the last year or so then more power to you. Just remember the unemployment lines are long and, right now, jobs are pretty scarce. Besides that, given the numbers above I'd be surprised if the cloud could beat the per user per month costs on at level on a sustained basis.
Thanks to Ed Brill for posting this, and a very special thank you to Applicable for putting some real numbers and quantitative analysis into this white paper. A very, very well done.
