Spotlight on Partner Opportunity with Notes Migrations
Yesterday it was the snow that kept your humble blogger home.
Today, an icepocalypse has displaced the snowpocalypse that kept Pacific Northwest folks stranded these last 36 hours.
To capitalize once more on the added bandwidth a “work@home” day offers, I thought I’d continue our ongoing “Spotlight on Partner Opportunity” series with a look at the opportunities around Lotus Notes Migration.
I don’t believe I need to reiterate the business opportunity or the resources Microsoft provides to help you win and deliver a Notes to Exchange 2010 or Office 365 deal, however I think it is useful to share with you an example of how partners are tapping into this business opportunity made possible by a super hungry Notes customer base seeking a rescue.
Okay.
Maybe just one more datapoint?
This time, here’s a look from the perspective of the “Exchange-to-Notes” business opportunity.
In a blog post by Gartner’s Tom Austin, he shared that in a 10 month period, “no Microsoft e-mail customers called us for advice on whether to migrate to Notes/Domino for e-mail.”
So, it’s pretty clear there’s work to be done on the Notes-to-Exchange front. Now, back to the partner spotlight on some real opportunity: migration tools.
For some time now, we’ve turned to our ISV partners to build migration tools to meet the specific needs and requirements our customers demand when moving from a legacy platform to Exchange or Exchange Online.
“Why is that, Ian?” you ask.
Considering that most customers moving away from a legacy platform—like Notes or GroupWise—have likely used this infrastructure for some time, there’s high probability there is a lot of important data housed in these aging investments. Therefore, we work with partners like Quest Software who have the expertise to know exactly what customers need when planning for email and calendaring migration and (many cases) coexistence during the transition.
Here’s what partners like Quest have to say about tapping into this opportunity:
“More and more, organizations of all sizes are faced with the question: ‘to cloud or not to cloud?’ But what customers are really asking for, though, is flexibility. Customers don’t want to be locked into a rigid, antiquated platform not extensible to other forms of unified communications, like Lotus Domino/Notes. Because of its inability to keep up with the latest market trends, we see a drastic drop off in its market share. Customers want their strategic communications to be flexible and adaptable to their businesses. Exchange 2010 and Exchange Online are the gold standard for enterprise messaging, offering the most flexibility for customers to make that decision. Quest is proud to be a leading Microsoft partner, having migrated more than 10 million mailboxes to Exchange and Exchange Online from Domino/Notes, as well migrating over 350,000 Notes applications to SharePoint using our proven methodology of preparation, migration, coexistence and management.”
- Michael Tweddle, Sr. Director Product Management, Quest Software
So what’s next?
- Use one of the many customer cases of the proven cost savings and productivity boosting results they achieved after moving from Notes to the Microsoft productivity stack and start a conversation with your customers. For example, Godiva Chocolatier saves $250,000 annually by moving off Lotus Notes and they utilized a migration toolset (from Binary Tree) to make that happen.
- Share links to the customer ready content we post to Why Microsoft? and the Microsoft Partner Network portal. As an example, this whitepaper on Migrating IBM Lotus Notes and Domino to the Cloud: Selecting Microsoft vs Google.
- Investigate the third party migration tools provided by partners like Quest, including their Notes Migration for Exchange, Coexistence Manager for Notes, and Notes Migrator for SharePoint
- Earn the new Messaging competency, and demonstrate your expertise to your to prospective Exchange customers.
Ian
Group Product Manager
Exchange Partner Marketing