Domino – Maintain, Commit to, or Vacate?

Lotus Domino still lives, and you have options for migrating away from or remaining with the platform.

Executive Summary

Info-Tech Insight

“HCL announced that they have somewhere in the region of 15,000 Domino customers worldwide, and also claimed that that number is growing. They also said that 42% of their customers are already on v11 of Domino, and that in the year or so since that version was released, it’s been downloaded 78,000 times. All of which suggests that the Domino platform is, in fact, alive and well.”
– Nigel Cheshire in Team Studio

Your Challenge

You have a Domino/Notes footprint embedded within your business units and business processes. This is taxing your support organization; you are meeting resistance from the business, and you are now asked to help the organization migrate away from the Lotus Notes platform. The Lotus Notes platform was long used by technology and businesses as a multipurpose solution that, over the years, became embedded within core business applications and processes.

Common Obstacles

For organizations that are struggling to understand their options for the Domino platform, the depth of business process usage is typically the biggest operational obstacle. Migrating off the Domino platform is a difficult option for most organizations due to business process and application complexity. In addition, migrating clients have to resolve the challenges with more than one replaceable solution.

Info-Tech Approach

The most common tactic is for the organization to better understand their Domino migration options and adopt an application rationalization strategy for the Domino applications entrenched within the business. Options include retiring, replatforming, migrating, or staying with your Domino platform.

Review

Is “Lotus” Domino still alive?

Problem statement

The number of member engagements with customers regarding the Domino platform has, as you might imagine, dwindled in the past couple of years. While many members have exited the platform, there are still many members and organizations that have entered a long exit program, but with how embedded Domino is in business processes, the migration has slowed and been met with resistance. Some organizations had replatformed the applications but found that the replacement target state was inadequate and introduced friction because the new solution was not a low-code/business-user-driven environment. This resulted in returning the Domino platform to production and working through a strategy to maintain the environment.

This research is designed for:

• IT strategic direction decision-makers
• IT managers responsible for an existing Domino platform
• Organizations evaluating migration options for mission-critical applications running on Domino

This research will help you:

1. Evaluate migration options.
2. Assess the fit and purpose.
3. Consider strategies for overcoming potential challenges.
4. Determine the future of this platform for your organization.

The “everything may work” scenario

Adopt and expand

Believe it or not, Domino and Notes are still options to consider when determining a migration strategy. With HCL still committed to the platform, there are options organizations should seek to better understand rather than assuming SharePoint will solve all. In our research, we consider:

Importance to current business processes

• Importance of use
• Complexity in migrations
• Choosing a new platform

Available tools to facilitate

• Talent/access to skills
• Economies of scale/lower cost at scale
• Access to technology

Info-Tech Insight

With multiple options to consider, take the time to clearly understand the application rationalization process within your decision making.

• Archive/retire
• Application migration
• Application replatform
• Stay right where you are

Eliminate your bias – consider the advantages

“There is a lot of bias toward Domino; decisions are being made by individuals who know very little about Domino and more importantly, they do not know how it impacts business environment.”

– Rob Salerno, Founder & CTO, Rivet Technology Partners

Domino advantages include:

Modern Cloud & Application

• No-code/low-code technology

Business-Managed Application

• Business written and supported
• Embrace the business support model
• Enterprise class application

Leverage the Application Taxonomy & Build

• A rapid application development platform
• Develop skill with HCL training

HCL Domino is a supported and developed platform

Why consider HCL?

• Consider scheduling a Roadmap Session with HCL. This is an opportunity to leverage any value in the mission and brand of your organization to gain insights or support from HCL.
• Existing Domino customers are not the only entities seeking certainty with the platform. Software solution providers that support enterprise IT infrastructure ecosystems (backup, for example) will also be seeking clarity for the future of the platform. HCL will be managing these relationships through the channel/partner management programs, but our observations indicate that Domino integrations are scarce.
• HCL Domino should be well positioned feature-wise to support low-code/NoSQL demands for enterprises and citizen developers.

Visualize Your Application Roadmap

1. Focus on the application portfolio and crafting a roadmap for rationalization.
   • The process is intended to help you determine each application’s functional and technical adequacy for the business process that it supports.
2. Document your findings on respective application capability heatmaps.
   • This drives your organization to a determination of application dispositions and provides a tool to output various dispositions for you as a roadmap.
3. Sort the application portfolio into a disposition status (keep, replatform, retire, consolidate, etc.)
   • This information will be an input into any cloud migration or modernization as well as consolidation of the infrastructure, licenses, and support for them.

Our external support perspective

by Darin Stahl

Member Feedback

• Some members who have remaining Domino applications in production – while the retire, replatform, consolidate, or stay strategy is playing out – have concerns about the challenges with ongoing support and resources required for the platform. In those cases, some have engaged external services providers to augment staff or take over as managed services.
• While there could be existing support resources (in house or on retainer), the member might consider approaching an external provider who could help backstop the single resource or even provide some help with the exit strategies. At this point, the conversation would be helpful in any case. One of our members engaged an external provider in a Statement of Work for IBM Domino Administration focused on one-time events, Tier 1/Tier 2 support, and custom ad hoc requests.
• The augmentation with the managed services enabled the member to shift key internal resources to a focus on executing the exit strategies (replatform, retire, consolidate), since the business knowledge was key to that success.
• The member also very aggressively governed the Domino environment support needs to truly technical issues/maintenance of known and supported functionality rather than coding new features (and increasing risk and cost in a migration down the road) – in short, freezing new features and functionality unless required for legal compliance or health and safety.
• There obviously are other providers, but at this point Info-Tech no longer maintains a market view or scan of those related to Domino due to low member demand.

Domino database assessments

Consider the database.

• Domino database assessments should be informed through the lens of a multi-value database, like jBase, or an object system.
• The assessment of the databases, often led by relational database subject matter experts grounded in normalized databases, can be a struggle since Notes databases must be denormalized.

Key/Value		Column
Use case: Heavily accessed, rarely updated, large amounts of data Data Model: Values are stored in a hash table of keys. Fast access to small data values, but querying is slow Processor friendly Based on amazon's Dynamo paper Example: Project Voldemort used by LinkedIn		Use case: High availability, multiple data centers Data Model: Storage blocks of data are contained in columns Handles size well Based on Google's BigTable Example: Hadoop/Hbase used by Facebook and Yahoo
Document		Graph
Use case: Rapid development, Web and programmer friendly Data Model: Stores documents made up of tagged elements. Uses Key/Value collections Better query abilities than Key/Value databases. Inspired by Lotus Notes. Example: CouchDB used by BBC		Use case: Best at dealing with complexity and relationships/networks Data model: Nodes and relationships. Data is processed quickly Inspired by Euler and graph theory Can easily evolve schemas Example: Neo4j

Understand your options

Archive/Retire

Store the application data in a long-term repository with the means to locate and read it for regulatory and compliance purposes.

Migrate

Migrate to a new version of the application, facilitating the process of moving software applications from one computing environment to another.

Replatform

Replatforming is an option for transitioning an existing Domino application to a new modern platform (i.e. cloud) to leverage the benefits of a modern deployment model.

Stay

Review the current Domino platform roadmap and understand HCL’s support model. Keep the application within the Domino platform.