A New Era, A New Future, A New Domino

Some of you may have already seen the tweets out of HCL and the announcement from IBM on the new strategic partnership for ICS products that IBM have just entered into with HCL.  To explain things as simply as possible this means that HCL will take over the development of most of the ICS products whilst IBM continues to manage the product strategy, marketing and licensing.  The products involved include

Domino
Notes (on premises and SmartCloud)
Traveler
Verse
Sametime
IBM Client Access
IMSMO (mail support for Microsoft Outlook)

So what does this actually mean for us as Business Partners and, more importantly, for customers?  In my opinion this is very good news.  The products will benefit from significantly more development investment and resources,  with the existing IBM development teams on those products moving under HCL  In addition IBM will continue to manage the product themselves (using the existing offerings management teams) as well as the licensing, and the strategic direction.

There is no longer any End of Life date for Domino, not even “at least until” dates.

As far as customers are concerned, nothing will change other than an acceleration in the investment and development of products including the announcement of Domino 10 for 2018 and the #Domino2025 project.  Even submitting PMRs will continue in the same way.  There will be no customer - HCL direct relationship.

What is Domino2025? Otherwise known as Project Sapphire this is a strategic and ongoing product development initiative IBM will be starting in November where they will be taking feedback on what people want to help drive the future of Domino.   You can tweet your feedback using #Domino2025 and look forward to workshops taking place worldwide as a continual process to design future (post v10) Domino.

I have a lot more thoughts which I’ll share over the coming days but when I first heard about this and considered it I realised that this is a huge opportunity and a step forward for all the products involved.  I hope you agree.

The birth of a new Domino!

6 thoughts on “A New Era, A New Future, A New Domino

  1. Hear Hear, let’s (re)built Notes & Domino together.

  2. Somewhere I hear Bob saying “I am not dead yet! I’m feeling better!”

  3. Can’t wait for the day to start-up Domino Designer 10. Wondering what tools and technologies they have in mind.

  4. Woot! I am loving the announcements, and am excited for the future!
    Here’s to an excellent product becoming even better.

  5. Am hoping genuine improvements are made. Improvements to UI, tools and development would be great, but some underlying issues need to be fixed urgently. The 64gb database limit has to go. Full text indexing needs work (have had so many times numeric fields indexing as text or date fields indexing as text, and fixing this is painful), and a lot of work on view updates.

  6. Just hope they do not ditch LotsScript and @Language and make them better…Would be like throwing the baby with the tub’s water when one considers how quick an app may be developped with them.

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