February 27th, 2006
Gregg Eldred writes of a customer loss
Though it is not clear what size this organization
is, Gregg
Eldred describes a customer’s decision
to move away from Notes:
On Thursday, in a fit of passion,
they moved to . . . neither Notes nor Exchange. They opted to use their
free webmail accounts with their web hosting company and now they are using
POP/IMAP for their mail. Yeah, now they have HTML mail and a slick webmail
interface, but they aren’t too sure of spam or anti-virus protection. Someone
else is now responsible for their mail system, a company that has a lot
of other customers to worry about. Will they get good support? Will their
mail be scanned and protected? Will those definitions be up to date? I
don’t know and I don’t know if they do, either.Any way, it’s hard to help when they don’t/can’t keep up with the maintenance.
Everything that they complained about was fixed/updated/improved in subsequent
releases. And yet, there they sat on R4.6.7. From a totally budgetary viewpoint,
it is hard to compete against “free.” And those POP/IMAP addresses
are free, at least in terms of cold, hard cash and in relation to either
Notes/Domino or Exchange.So, while we didn’t lose to Exchange, we did lose a Notes customer.
Ah
yes, the pennywise-and-pound-foolish mentality. Here we have a customer
who was still running software from 1996 and wondering why it didn’t do
what they wanted in 2006. It’s like buying a perfectly good car and
believing that one never has to do oil changes, tuneups, or even take it
through a car wash occasionally. Oh, and no insurance either — they
hadn’t bought a maintenance agreement at any point in that time.
Now they’ve moved to an environment
where their e-mail might not even have their own company name as their
FQDN. Gregg identifies some of the risks, but how about some others
– is their mail being backed up? What’s the SLA if there is a need
to get to that backup? What archiving solution is in place? How
is compliance being addressed? What happens if their web hosting
company is acquired? What about directory services for their employees?
I’m disappointed that Gregg wasn’t able
to show this customer how an upgrade, even from 4.x, would protect their
existing investments and be cost-effective. Sometimes, though, the
“wallet check” leads companies to make decisions based on raw
cashflow, and they’ll be able to say “at least we didn’t spend $5000
on new software” or whatever. Good luck to them.
Originally by Ed Brill from Ed Brill on February 22, 2006, 4:10am
