IBM Lotus Notes - Future

Future

Since the IBM acquisition of Lotus in 1995, some industry analysts and mainstream business press writers, along with IBM competitors, have made repeated predictions of the decline or impending demise of Lotus Notes. One noted example of this was an article published in Forbes magazine entitled "The decline and fall of Lotus", published in April 1998. Since then, IBM claims that the installed base of Lotus Notes has increased from an estimated 42 million seats in September 1998 to approximately 145 million cumulative licenses sold through 2008. (IBM does not publish the number of licenses on current maintenance. Additionally, Lotus users who no longer pay maintenance are permitted to keep using the software—they are simply not permitted to install subsequent releases.)

Speculation about the decline of Lotus Notes was fueled by lingering market confusion emanating from IBM placing marketing emphasis on Websphere and IBM Workplace in 2003 and 2004. IBM Workplace, however, has been discontinued, thus this source of confusion about the future of Lotus Notes and Lotus Domino has been rendered moot. While the future of any product in the technology sector cannot be predicted, IBM has made announcements that indicate that it continues to invest heavily in research and development on the Lotus Notes product line.

Notes 8, which was previously code-named "Hannover" (after the location of the 22nd Deutsche Notes User Group meeting, where it was first shown to the public) incorporates Notes into a larger Eclipse framework and includes support for productivity editors based on the OpenDocument format. (These editors have also been released in a standalone package called IBM Lotus Symphony.) In addition, IBM executive Ken Bisconti has made public comments on several occasions asserting that there will be releases 9 and 10 of Notes and Domino.

In 2005, some analysts concluded that Lotus is losing market share to Microsoft Exchange. There is no general agreement, however, about methods of accurately calculating share in the messaging and collaboration market. Figures based on seat count may be skewed by the presence of unused seats that are counted as a result of "bundled CALs", and figures based on customer count may be skewed by difference in typical customer organization sizes. IBM has asserted that growth shown in the revenue figures for the Lotus brand, as published in their audited annual financial report, purportedly show the continuing strength of the Lotus Notes product in the market. According to these figures, the Notes and Domino product line has sustained double-digit growth since late 2004 and continuing through 2006, including 30% year-to-year growth in Q4 of 2006.

IBM contributed some of the code it had developed for the integration of the OpenOffice.org suite into Notes 8 to the project. IBM also packaged its version of OpenOffice.org for free distribution as IBM Lotus Symphony.

Lotus Notes and Lotus Domino 8.0.1 shipped in February 2008, and 8.0.2 came in the summer.

Lotus Notes and Lotus Domino 8.5, which includes a MacOS client, support for Ubuntu in addition to Red Hat Linux and SUSE Linux, as well as an Eclipse-based Domino Designer, shipped in December 2008. Version 8.5 also offers a new Ajax-enabled web programming paradigm called XPages. Since then, additional refreshes have been released including Lotus Notes 8.5.1, Lotus Notes 8.5.2, and Lotus Notes 8.5.3.