Why there should never be a ‘winner’ in Cloud-based collaboration

Congratulations to IBM for landing a major deal with Panasonic for it’s LotusLive online collaboration suite. Seriously, well done!

I’ve never been a huge fan of Notes as an application or environment, I found it clunky and strange and somehow not fitting in with my PC look and feel – hieroglyphs in the logon box(!). It’s been a few years of course, but I think that the look and feel are along the same lines.

But a 300,000 user win over Microsoft is significant in a couple of ways. For a long time we’ve been led to believe that Exchange server is the best way to deliver Enterprise-class collaboration and anything else was simply niche. We’ve also been told that, in terms of SaaS, the Microsoft platform is simply superior to others at it enables access from anywhere at any time. The other thing here is that there SHOULD be competition and I’m pleased that there is.

Without the challenge of competition and the occasional significant loss, all of the vendors would lapse pretty quickly into lotus-eater status (no pun intended!). Competition drives innovation and progress and this is vital for us all as consumers.
Microsoft have seen erosion of their desktop dominance over the last couple of years, and not from tech-centric Linux users either. Apple have been taking big bites out of the consumer market space with the ‘it just works’ model of product delivery. The result is that Microsoft have put some significant effort into Windows 7 and it shows. Vista was truly awful and cost them dear, ’7′ as a refresh of that Vista core is a breath of fresh air – albeit with a subtle scent of Cupertino underneath!

The online service space is currently host to a bunch of Email+ solutions and it’s sometimes a bit difficult to look beyond the brand elements to see what meets your requirements. It’s with good historic reason that Microsoft = enterprise quality, Lotus = legacy and Google = cheap (in the not-so-good sense of the word). But the game is changing and everyone is stepping up their approach and there are the new players too, Cisco have a solution, Postini and Open Exchange are gaining ground with the Hosters and therefore growing in the market.

For a number of reasons I’ve had to take a genuine look at online email+ services over the last couple of weeks, examining what I wanted from a system as well as what I actually needed and how much (if anything) I would pay for such a solution. The results were interesting to me and I’ve moved in a direction which, 12 months ago, I’d never have considered. That’s how munch things have changed and it’s all down to one thing, competition.

There are going to be casualties along the way and that’s always unfortunate, people and organisations will make wrong (but never bad) decisions because they didn’t take the time to actually understand what they needed or bought based on a brand or predjudice, rather than getting the best technical and business fit. There’ll also be a thinning of the ranks of the vendors too, perhaps not fatally for anyone but certainly the initial shortlist will be shorter. That shortlist should always have 2-3 solutions on at least and it’s my hope that those solution will continue to push the levels of service and functionality forward.

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   Letisha Zaxas says:

   February 19, 2010 at 4:20 pm

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