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Thursday, July 12, 2007

Domino Server for sale, price $500K

Ed Brill has a discussion about Microsoft which has derailed into SAP and other issues.
Now SAP is huge and means everything to corporations IMHO.
Why doesn't Domino?
Well, Domino was never meant to be an ERP system, sure you can code one, but really there are better ways. BI yes, ERP no.
Someone rasied a point that SAP implementations were so expensive that there was no other way to use it but for everything and anything.
The everything looks like a nail to your hammer theory.

I proposed that perhaps Lotus should increase the cost of Domino to half a million dollars and no client license fees.
Naturally this will never happen, of course, perhaps if it had been this way early on we might still be holding authority over corprate messaging.

Now when a company debates changing systems it sounds better to say we like this one, it does a lot more than just email, hooks into our ERP and requires less administration.
And the price is only 1/2 million per server. A reverse price war, which would be insane now, but could have worked years ago.

The reponse is one of 2 ways, obvious is what are you crazy we get exchange for free! The CTO should retort yes but it's costing us $1million a week in downtime alone! If you do not believe me, I am available for this review of your company and I guarantee I will find at least $1million a week lost or you don't pay my fees.

The other response could be, interesting, we get real value, it hooks into SAP and can handle applications as well and works with the portal? Why don't we do this?

Now good readers, I have been around for a long time and I have seen crazy things, but nothing is crazier than an IT manager/director who tries to shuffle a Domino app to the CIO/CTO for 50K or even 250K and see it blown to pieces while a totally useless project(well technology speaking) claims to need $5million and gets it. The reason is executive speak. If a project costs above a certain amount, executives fear it and agree to it because it must be mission critical.

When the same exec gets a request for a small amount of money they look at it as nickel and diming them and it must be unimportant because if it was important they would ask for a few million!

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