HCL picks up Notes, spanks total of $1.8bn at Honest John's IBM software sale Indian software outfit HCL Technologies is snapping up $1.8bn worth of IBM's software in a deal expected to close by the middle of 2019. The acquisition, worth just under 5 per cent of a RedHat in IBM parlance, will see the Uttar Pradesh-based company absorb secure app platform Appscan and device manager BigFix. On-premises …
Had a little experience with BigFix (pretty good patch management software prior to being parked in software limbo by IBM) and Unica (again parked by IBM but was told it had pretty unique features that were valued before Salesforce came along).
The inclusion of Notes/Domino must have meant the original asking price was upwards of $5b...
At least there’s a vague chance of HCL improving the products rather than leaving them in limbo.
A friend who works for the Borg told me how much profit they make off of these old products.
You collect the license/maintenance fee while you spend little on break fix maintenance and no R&D on new features. Big money maker...
The only reason IBM will sell off these products is that they don't believe that they have much more life in them and need to switch their portfolio to newer tech aka Cloud, Kubernetes, and analytics where they can attempt to sell at a premium and stay relevant.
HCL (Hmmm a lot like HAL) see this as a way to continue to capture revenue and entry into customers to sell other products and services. Sort of like buying that used car so you can drive for Uber.
The truth is that it makes sense, but the numbers do not. Well maybe.
IBM is counting on being able to switch customer from old products to new products while HCL is betting that customers will hang on to legacy apps longer and that the move will be slower.
Also that they can then morph the platforms in to something new.
Platinum Software did this back in the 90's and made a fortune.
Time will tell.
Posted anon, for the Obvious reasons.
Your summary of IBMs software acquisition management is 90% accurate - the only thing missing is the increases in maintenance to drive away all but the most dependent customers.
The challenge with this approach is that the rapid change in client OSes and drive to improve security that has a habit of breaking these apps push customers to alternative solutions.
I’d be surprised if IBM are counting on anything other than the money in the bank for this...
In 18 months?
It died years ago, it’s just IBM refused to pay for the funeral... Two major releases in ~10 years (I’m being generous including v10 as it’s only been out a few months) for a product that had features its major competitors included 15+ years ago and shedding customers at the rate of around 5 million a year and are now down to around 30m worldwide with about 50% paying maintenance although I suspect a big chunk of those users are on an alternative mail platform...
Long ago and far away, in a Big Six firm, I quite liked the Notes training. When I got back to my office, I started looking for useful Notes "databases". My employer had built hundreds of them, many of them potentially useful. That was...until I found that each useful database had a different administrator, and needed a separate sign on and login for each and every one. I gave up after a couple of months...so I can't say today whether Notes was useful or not. Clearly not useful to me!
> That was...until I found that each useful database had a different administrator, and needed a separate sign on and login for each and every one.
Your lack of initiative is quite disappointing. You should have used your newly acquired skills to create a password manager database, in Notes.
"until I found that each useful database had a different administrator, and needed a separate sign on and login for each and every one."
Having worked with Notes for 20 years I can honestly say it's not necessary to have a "separate sign on" for each database. I've never heard it recommended and I've never come across any organisation that has imposed such a crazy idea on their users.
The authentication is handled via the Notes ID and you authenticate when you load the Notes client. That's it. No login required after that (unless you have a needlessly complicated environment, but that's a different story).
The databases have an access control list and different levels of access. There is a Manager access level, but Manager != Administrator. Most of well-maintained ACLs use user groups, so no need most of the time to go an deal with the ACL itself.
Thought this had to be said because what you describe and the reality of Notes' security seem to be two different things. Also, is it too late for a refund for that Notes training? I don't think they provide a good service.
You were either using something else then Notes or whoever setup the environment for you had maybe just one more Notes training then you had :). One of the biggest strengths of Notes was easy control of access based on roles and groups. Trained monkey could have set it up with few clicks. There are no 'logins'. You only 'login' to Notes client once and you can then access any Domino server that is able to recognize you. Actually that login is nothing more then password for so called notes id file which is actually certificate that holds all necessary information about you (same as the certs some ppl are using to access eg bank accounts or sign/encrypt the mail). That was all built-in more then 20 years ago in Notes and only thing that was making ppl mad was poor UI that did not improved much over those 20 years. They tried to suit up Notes by using Java/html/css etc but at the core the poor UI was still there. Even Domino designer ment for developers did not get much options for customization however even non-programmer could easily start programming workflows and apps (and on user level you are able to do lot of stuff and automation using lotus script).
Btw. Notes DBs are actually first NoSQL databases...
You obviously have not heard of Full Access Administration !
Before you go slagging a product off, try and learn it to give an educated point of view.
On a Domino server under security there is a field called "Full Access Administrators" if you add your self here, you will have manager access to every database on the server regardless of Database ACL.
To use it once you have connected to the Domino server via an Admin client select the top tab Administration, from the drop down list select "Full Access Administration" this will switch it on.
Once it is on, you can then if you want select all the databases on the server and add yourself with manager access.
My medium-sized multinational company just got rid of Notes 2 years ago...for email. There are still some business-critical functions carried out via workflows embedded in Notes databases. But I'm sure the owners have spent this time rebuilding them...I hope...
I can't believe it's managed to hang on this long. I never really liked it, but in the dial-up days it was very handy to be able to take your entire mailbox with you and work offline as if you were connected. Outlook didn't get that for ages. The positive thing is that now that's in the hands of some Indian outsourcing firm, we're never going to see any NEW deployments. Maybe that will finally be the thing to kill it...just keeping it on life support for the one or two holdouts.
... still use Notes as their internal mail platform?
I used to use 'BigFix' when I was Blue, it was a buy in, originally called BigFix, then renamed to Tivoli Endpoint Manager, then IBM Endpoint Managed, then IBM BigFix, and i guess now, HCL BigFix.
Odd for IBM to sell tools it uses internally, sure they'll rake in some dough, but end up paying via licenses, Wikipedia reckons Big Blue still has ~366,000 employees, That's a lot of revenue for HCL.
Odd for IBM to sell tools it uses internally, sure they'll rake in some dough, but end up paying via licenses, Wikipedia reckons Big Blue still has ~366,000 employees, That's a lot of revenue for HCL.
One joke had it that IBM bought Lotus because their Notes servers were down...
Reading this reminder that this thing is still alive, a horrible thought occurred to me and I had to see if it might be true. And yes, there are Android and iOS apps available for Notes. Did not want to investigate any further in case it brought back too many memories of when I last had to use it, 20 years ago this year in fact.
Win98 was parallel to NT 4, not really a forerunner of XP. Different kinds of things.
Win 95 parallel to NT3.5
Win 3.11 was parallel to NT 3.1 which was the first NT in 1993 (There was an MS version of OS/2 in 1989 with LAN manager for DOS/ Windows)
ME (Arrrgh) was sort of parallel to NT 5.0 known as Win 2000
ME was the last development of the Windows GUI loaded after booting DOS. (Win 1, 2, 286, 386 all poor, Win 3.0 nearly there, Win 3.1 first reasonable version of the GUI)
XP was NT 5.1
Server 2003 or maybe Itanium XP 64 Pro* or maybe x86-64 XP Pro was NT 5.2
Vista was NT 6.0. The Itanium 64 bit XP was killed off early!
Win 7 was really a SP, or something of Vista. It was NT 6.1
Win8 should never have existed and inexplicably was NT 6.2, so must have mostly been a crazy change to the Desktop.
Win 9 didn't exist because of stupid programmers checking for a stupid string like 9* instead of functionality.
Win10 should be NT 7.0, but they had Windows 7 already. Besides Apple stayed at Version 10 after OS 9, since March 2001 and MS wants to copy Apple, Adobe and Google. Hence every new version of NT will be now Windows 10 and NT 10.
(*There was a 64 bit version of NT4.0 for Alpha. NT at one stage supported x86, Pentium Pro (win9x ran bad on Pentium Pro because it ran 16bit natively, NT used WOW and NTVDM), MIPS, Power PC, 32 bit Alpha. Unlike Win3.1/Win9x/WinME, NT never ran DOS or 16 bit Windows code natively but on a NTVDM with all Win16 APIs mapped to 32 bit Windows (WOW).)
Notes always promised a lot but was too laborious to setup/use quickly.
Perfect example of a piece of software predicated on 'User lock-in'.
By time you had it setup to do something useful, it was too costly to consider ever moving off it.
I expect the few remaining users will be finally looking to move elsewhere.
Lots of paying work for anyone who knows Notes and is tasked with migrating systems elsewhere :)
Probably another thing Crapita could do at a bargain price ;)
Time to setup a Domino server, including creating server, admin and user IDs: 5 minutes. Another five for a decent web server configuration. Add another five minute to setup the client. There you go: 15 minutes and I've got a decent client/server setup and can do pretty much what I want. But ok, 15 minutes can be long for some folks... Remind me how quickly you can set up an Exchange and Sharepoint server to (not nearly) do the same thing?
It's costly to move off of it because despite what Microsoft says, it's not a simple process to go from the Notes format to the Exchange/Outlook format (Microsoft has been at it for 20 years now? You'd think they would have sorted that out by now). Also, you are still far, far away from parity with regards to applications, development, etc... Microsoft has also been working on this for a long time, you'd also think they'd have that sorted out by now...
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