Who Announces New Products in Tokyo? HCL That's Who

A little bit historical symbolism inside, a little bit new, and 100% of the future!

HCL sent an email out to Business Partners and HCL Masters (I am both) yesterday announcing that they are good on their word and releasing announce HCL’s first major releases for:
Domino V11
Notes V11
Sametime V11
Connections 6.5
plus some other items perhaps on December 4th at 9AM Eastern Time from Tokyo.

Details:

9–­9:15 a.m.: Live from Tokyo Keynote: A Major HCL Milestone.
Presenter: Richard Jefts, General Manger, HCL Digital Solutions

9:15–9:30 a.m.: Domino V11: Why Modernizing Beats Migrating. Presenter: Andrew Manby, Vice President of Product Management, HCL Domino

9:30–9:45 a.m.: Domino V11 Demo: One Vendor, One Solution, One Stack. The Only Stack You Need.

Presenter: Andrew Manby, Vice President of Product Management, HCL Domino  

9:45–10 a.m.: We Hear You: HCL Connections 6.5 = More Value from Your Investment.
Danielle Baptiste, Vice President of Product Management, HCL Connections

10–10:15 a.m.: Boost Engagement with HCL Connections 6.5: We'll Show You How. Danielle Baptiste, Vice President of Product Management, HCL Connections

10:15–10:30 a.m.: Get Started with Domino V11 and Connections 6.5 Today.Presenter: Presenter: François Nasser, Global Sales Leader, HCL Digital Solutions

Many of you just got V10, or have yet to take that leap, but HCL has got you covered and wants you to move to V11.

So what do you think? Are you spry enough to update this time? If not, let me know, I am happy to handle it for you.

If you want to watch or listen to the announcement, it will be on this website over here.(https://www.gotostage.com/channel/livefromtokyo) Register here.

If you thought HCL was just milking the support money and not expanding the products, you lost that bet, and will continue to lose that bet for a few years out, but you have to tune in to find out why and how.

If you thought Notes and Domino were old and not caught up with the times, you may be pleasantly surprised to see changes that will stretch life longer because 30 year old(software) know a lot more than an under 5 year old(startup) about how you run your company, and integrate your business to the world as a whole, not just to one vendor, or one country.

In software terms, not many other software has survived this long and still produced money and ROI for companies using it, DOS still runs Windows, so that may be the only thing everyone still uses.

If you say email doesn't make you money, tell that to online stores and entities that rely on automated orders and ticketing systems.

Down time hurts, big time!

If you require on premises servers, you have come to the right place!
If your fear is the Cloud apps will get stuck, yes, on premises has down time too, YOU can control the situation and get your self back up, something not available to you when you are 100% Cloud indebted.

I hear the young people saying no one uses email, everything is in Slack and their integrations into products we use.

Maybe

But did you ever meet a person on the street that uses slack?

Neither have I.

But they ALL use email. They also use instant messengers but the bridge from the IM to email is still not there, yet...

So tune in December 4th 9am Eastern time, if you want to be part of the next generation of collaborative software.

Can We Get To Work Now?

As you may have heard, the divorce from IBM of the Lotus Portfolio of products has come to a conclusion and HCL has come out the winner,

The value of the deal ensures a decent rate of return to HCL within 3 years(maybe earlier) based solely on Support and Services, otherwise known as renewals.

The efforts to stop the leaving and increase the renewals only adds gravy to the deal for HCL.

But many of us want to see a new land, we want to not just see people hang on, but new customers come out of the cold. This could be the start of a renewal for the product line, sure, few companies have done it, Apple being the biggest turn around, and we have to do it without Steve Jobs. Not sure if that is the vision, but it is a goal which I think should be on everyone's mind.

We have to see the world, not like it was, not like we wish it was, but as it is and how we can once again be useful to people. Yet, once again, daily, we will have to prove that a venerable product, it  never went away in 30 years while so many disappeared, still runs and can run many companies worlds.

Sure, Salesforce now does workflow and automation, taking our niche potentially, or at least trying to if you believe a $200 million software project in Salesforce is required to replace, and not fully, a Domino application. The limitations and costs of Salesforce are not enough to convince someone to drop Salesforce, to push on those is working the competitive tactics of old.

Embrace and extend maybe is the answer, but that would end up a Business Partner play, aside from HCL getting the APIs to place nicely.

Microsoft of course still worries about us, funny how old flames die hard but the old ways, do not work the same and a better play in the competitive space is needed.

Google/Alphabet still sucks at calendaring and while the focus from HCL may not be messaging, messaging still is what runs a lot of businesses.

Workflow and automation demand a solid, stable, secure platform that can be relied upon to work no matter what you throw at it and no matter how little you babysit it. Do you ever hear Exchange admins say they love Exchange? No, not really, but there are 100s if not 1,000s of people out there that will say they love Domino.

It.is.THAT.Good

Back to HCL Software and the future, while the dust settles and this 3 Billion dollar(Lotus bits)  startup creates logic where there was none, have some patience.

We would all like to see new commercials and marketing, but in a modern world, that doesn't cut it enough. If we really want this to succeed, we need to embrace the social media side, not just pay lip service to it.

We need to ingrain into people that MongoDB is only decades behind Domino in getting field level encryption in a NoSQL flat database.

And people treat that like news?

IBM would never let us go after this, but my hope is HCL will because if we don't bring the issues to the front, there is no press and no customers begging to come back.

Do we need new templates? Yes, and we need to find a way to make them flexible enough so customers can adopt them easily enough. I have some ideas in this space for another blog post.

Do we need to revise old ones? It wouldn't hurt, and these will help keep customers renewing. I gave my input already on the Rooms and Resources.

I have argued that to try to convince people to code with Domino is a hard sell, kids in college have never seen or heard of it. More importantly, the workforce is not what it was in the dawn of the PC industry.

Many employees are niche driven and not code happy, or even interested.

In the earlier days, those of us that wanted to find a better way or figure something out had to read anything we can find, play with everything, dig into stuff that even now I think about some of it was amazing.

But I don't see that spark in employees. The need to know more is gone, maybe because love of company went away over the last 20 years. If HCL can figure out how to light that spark again, we may be on top something.

I mentor startups and they listen to me explain long dead products that did what they plan to do and what went wrong so they can try to make a better way...while scratching their head why they never heard of these solutions.

HCL has the chance to do everything we have been begging IBM to do with the products for years. Now we just need to get on with it and be aware that the future is being built literally every minute as of officially 17 hours ago Grenwich Mean Time.