How much are your Domino Applications Worth? DAC Knows

Most of you reading this are my Yellowverse bubble, BPs, consultants, advisers, fellow IBM Champions and a few friends so this will not be new news to you.

To the few, the proud, the admins and executives who are blessing me with a few minutes of their time, this may come as huge news, or not.

You already moved your mail to the IBM SmartCloud Notes cloud mail, humor me for a minute even if you have not yet. You are sitting on a small server farm or VM landscape supporting your core, enterprise grade, money making, workflow functioning Domino applications.

Obviously because you did not like the idea of co-location or you would have done that at least 10 years ago.

Probably you never wanted your proprietary data to be residing permanently outside of your firewall and did not look into any hosting options, public or private, even if Prominic has been hosting Domino for decades?(I do not work for Prominic but have used their services over the years)

Officially you say you would never let your data outside your site....and then the CFO or CEO says kill the servers by Dec 31. What do you do?

Road Trip!

Yes your data is about to go on a one way trip. One way because who brings everything back in house once it is out? Do you have your post college married children living at home with you now? Don't answer that.

IBM has decided to help you and if you can meet the requirements, your applications will get the VIP treatment(you pay for it of course) and you get some benefit as well, like no more 3AM server down emergencies.

For $27 PER APPLICATION, IBM will host your app at the Domino Application on Cloud (DAC) server in a data center near you, well your country not city, in a Docker container with a Linux machine (I'd like to think there is a beautiful Z series doing this someplace) which means you get most of the comforts of home providing you meet some requirements as follows:

• The application can not be larger than 25GB (unknown if this includes the index or not)
• The app must start with the letter L
• Bring your existing IBM Domino license
• You must sign on for a year upfront (this isn't Burger King's "Have IT Your Way")
• Seems like you need a minimum of 10 applications although I am sure IBM would be happy to charge you $270/month for 1 application if that is what you really want. If you think about it, hosting your own server will cost at least that much once you figure in all your costs so it's a good deal?

Want the full details? Here you go the full slide deck: https://goo.gl/hDurDG


You get all the nice parts of an IBM Domino Utility server so NO mail functions. See above where I mentioned the mail in the cloud part.

So how much are your Domino applications worth? $324/yr/app seems ludicrously low to me. Your applications run your business and bring some serious value to you, don't belittle them.

However, you probably stopped asking for big budget money for your Enterprise solution years ago, so your boss thinks this is a steal. Which it is and if you act in October when it becomes available your local IBM rep or BP(ahem, ask me about it) will love you even more. 

PS - Just kidding about the app must start with the letter L, everyone knows it is the letter I

What is this Watson Workspace thing?

IBM in recent days has made a number of announcements, some of which are more public than others, today I want to discuss Watson Workspace (WW) and Watson Workspace Essentials (WWE).

As the name implies, it is an Instant Mesaging (IM) program that, hang on, that's not right. Let's back up a second.

Why the name Workspace? I have no idea, I thought it was a beta name. Seriously now, it is because the young generation of marketers were not born when us old people were using ICQ, AOL and other vintage messaging tools and they prefer the old school term of collaboration, so collaborative workspaces. Yes. I know IBM calls it a messaging app, semantics, semantics.

So Watson Workspace is an IM program, sorry, I mean a collaborative workspace in which your discussions can be analyzed and enhanced by the cognitive capabilities of Watson. and it is FREE!

Why would you want this? Some of you out there that do not have the FOMO (fear of missing out) problem can get an easy recap of those 100 messages about whether to call the next product a number or a verb and just tell you the outcome.

No, it will not automagically answer people that ask you something, but as bots expand and more developers get a hold of the code I believe this will come soon enough. Good thing too, as someone who sits 7 hours ahead of EST, by the time I read the messages the discussion is over, so an automatic bot would be nice.

But when you just want that executive summary, I know of no other IM, sorry collaborative messaging platform that provides this benefit. Leave me a comment if you do.

There is a mobile version and a windows desktop edition (64bit only, sorry tree huggers) in addition to a browser version. For all of you that think Slack is so unique, there is an IFTTT integration between WW and Slack assisting you to never leave your cocoon and can interact with your peers that are chasing that corner executive suite.

Speaking of executives, you enterprise workers will want need the Watson Workspace Essentials (costs money edition) so you get Single Sign On (SSO) and some control over the system.

Here is a quick breakdown of the differences:

WW is FREE, with 1GB of storage per user, no enterprise management and only an online support forum, and it is FREE!

WWE costs $6/month/user, provides 20GB storage per user, enterprise management and SSO integration and guest user management

Right now WW only speaks English, but within the next 60+/- days PFIGS will be available otherwise known as Portuguese, French, Italian, German, Spanish.

Interested?  It's easy to get started with WW, just sign in (or register) with your IBMid to  https://workspace.ibm.com and you can be up and running in seconds. 

Go on, try it, you might like it. This is not your grandfather's IBM.

PS - This is why I don't write marketing copy for IBM,  they take everything way too seriously