Cheaper Bythe Dozen: Profiles of 12 Users and Their Approach to TCO
Accounting Firm 110,000 seats
We migrated to Lotus Notes about five years ago without cost justifying it because ıwe asked what product works the way we work, and it was Notes. We put a few numbers to paper, and it was done.ı Lotus ıhad the best collaboration productı and collaboration is key to the kind of knowledge management work pursued by this company. Thousands of applications are based on Notesıeverything from conference room scheduling to payroll time and financial reporting. Uptime is 99.87 percent to 99.94 percent, calculated from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. Server load and memory restrictions are determined locally, since hardware purchases are local. The average mailbox size is 50 MB, and the average message size is 55 KB. Bandwidth usage doubles every six months, but costs only double every 2.5 to 3 years because of price reductions for bandwidth and routers.

Alex Lee, Hickory, N.C.
Retail and Wholesale Food Distributor
Calvin Sihilling, Vice President Information Systems
750 clients
We migrated from a mainframe-based mail system to Netscape without examining TCOıprimarily because ıit didn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that Netscape was cheaper than Lotus Notes or Microsoft Exchange for the simple mail processes we needed.ı The fall 1997 migration was primarily launched to support Internet mail and attachments. The total cost of the new system was less than $20,000, including a 2-hour training class for those unfamiliar with Internet clients. No scheduled outages are planned for the system, and by April it had experienced only one unscheduled outage since startup in January.

Large Research Organization More than 6,000 clients
Last year, we began migrating from Lotus cc:Mail to Microsoft Exchange to improve productivity using groupware and reduce outages from aging technology. We examined TCO informally, but were primarily driven by the benefits of new technology and better reliability and uptime. We use Notes for many collaborative applications but we selected Exchange for messaging, calendaring and other functions because of desktop-integration issues. Up-front costs for Notes were almost twice those of Exchange at the time of the decision, and there were marketplace concerns about IBM Corp.'s recent acquisition of Lotusıwhich, in hindsight, were unjustified. Exchange costs more to administer than cc:Mail, but the organization's message store has grown by a factor of five in two years. ıIt's an apples and oranges comparison,ı says an IT manager, because ıwe are using calendaring, providing alternative access to capabilities (POP3 and Web Access), contact management, task management, shared folders and automatic synchronized directory companywide.ı Overall the system is much more reliable, although it occasionally hiccups, he says. Scheduled downtime is expected to occur semiannually for a six to eight-hour period. In an average week, ıit's probably no more than a few hours that any server is downı on an unscheduled basis. The organization has lowered the cost of many new internal applications by focusing on a Web interfaceıleveraging the pre-installed browser on all workstations. User mailboxes are limited to 40 MB, but the organization seeks to increase capacity for some staff during its next budget period. ıWe expect to do this through additional storage capacity, user training and mailbox management tools. The organization prefers to store critical information in the Exchange database for central backup rather than push information out to the user desktop where backups are less reliable. The largest servers handle about 500 clients, but smaller servers are employed to limit backbone usage. Training costs about $450,000 with one hour to one-and-a-half hours of training required of all staff. Optional advanced training was available a few times per month during the migration and will continue for at least six months following its completion. In hindsight, more training on Microsoft's Outlook might have been helpful.

Black Photo Corp., Canada
Photography Retail Chain
John Hurst, Director of Information Systems
1,500 mailboxes on 500 clients
Black Photo will consolidate on Lotus Notes from an environment with both Lotus Notes and cc:Mail. TCO was not evaluated since the rollout is primarily focused on e-mail clients in about 500 stations at store and central office locations. Out-of-the-box Exchange lacks the relational database (versus flat file) forms management that Black Photo wants, although ıit might be cheaper to implement from a standing start.ı Driving the reexamination of how messaging is used was the fact that Black's cc:Mail software is not Year-2000 compatible. Black's decision to standardize on Lotus was influenced by pricing that matched the cost of cc:Mail clients with those of Notesıalthough server costs are higher. Administration of the consolidated network initially calls for one or fewer full-time staff with outside consulting. Current scheduled downtime is a half day on the weekend every two months for both cc:Mail and Notes. Unscheduled downtime experienced by a typical user is about five minutes per month with Notes. Black plans to pilot the consolidated system this summer with a full rollout planned for the first half of next year.

Dell Computer Corp. 12,500 seats
Arnie Panella, Senior Manager, Global Messaging Infrastructure
Dell migrated nationally from cc:Mail to Exchange beginning last August, with completion expected May 1998. The rollout was part of a larger Office 97/Outlook deployment. The number will rise to more than 18,000 with an upcoming global rollout. About 400 clients are targeted to each server, but numbers may be smaller because of geographic distribution. About 25 percent of employees received some training. Sixty percent of the install cost was manpower, with hardware as the second highest cost. Tivoli was used for the Exchange distribution, but directory cleanup and turned off workstations caused some frustration. E-mail TCO was studied midway through the migration, but simplifying the desktop was the paramount issue for Dell. Downtime with cc:Mail was also a problem; Dell no longer schedules downtime with the move to Microsoft Exchange, which is "more supportable and reliable." The downside: message sizes have increased five to seven times, making it necessary to connect remote users at speeds higher than 26 Kbps or face performance problems. More training, especially of remote users, might have been helpful.

Exxon Corp. Oil company
Durwin Sharp, Senior Technology Architect
65,000 seats
Exxon migrated from IBM PROFS to Microsoft Exchange, skipping file-based mail. Four years ago, when the decision was made, it was ıa choice of a truck (Exchange at $100 to $200 per seat installed) or a Winnebago (Lotus Notes at $500 per seat).ı Today, the system costs a bit less than $200 per seat annually to maintain ıand tens of people aren't needed for database administration.ı Mail is business-critical, with uptime at 99.6 percent to 99.8 percent. Maintenance takes a couple of hours per month on weekends. TCO factored into the mail migration, but wasn't controlling. ıThere are free mail clients that would have been cheaper butıwe wanted a reliable, manageable service preferably for less than the ($600 per seat) cost of our mainframe mail.ı Bandwidth usage has increased 100 percent since the migration four years agoıprimarily owing to e-mail itself. Users pay a surcharge if server space exceeds 25 MB. Messages exceeding 10 MB are discouraged. Server loads typically are restricted to less than a known pain point of 1,500 clients. Sharp believes costs have been controlled by policies preventing proliferation of public folders. Exchange's downside is not enough granularity in access privileges for administrators.

Hewitt Associates LLC, Lincolnshire, Ill.
Human Resources Consulting and Outsourcing
Greg Kozak, responsible for distributed computing infrastructure 8,500 clients
Hewitt migrated from IBM PROFS to Lotus Notes in 1993. The company did not examine TCO at the time of its migration because ıwe are a knowledge organization, and Notes is well-suited for capturing and retrieving knowledge.ı Hewitt also appreciates Notes' cc:Mail interface for backend connections to partners. Typical users spend about 60 percent of their desk time in Notes. Hewitt employs about 120 global servers managed by fewer than 15 associates. It has fewer than 10 full-time developers and more than 1,500 Notes-based non-mail databases created from 10 to 12 templates. The threshold for pain lies with more than 900 clients on a server (Hewitt doesn't want an outage to affect more than that number), although 70 clients per server is the average load because of geographic distribution. Uptime is better than 99.5 percent; the average user experienced about six minutes of downtime in April. Scheduled downtime lasts about four hours per week on the weekend. Notes is used for applications such as discussion databases, project management, documentation and project planning, client information, trip expenses, surveys, and benefits enrollment.

Plymouth Rock Assurance Corp., Boston
Insurance company
Myron Karasik, Vice President Technology
650 clients (including independent agency locations)
Plymouth migrated from MS Mail to Exchange while retaining browser-based access to Lotus Domino. TCO wasn't formally examined, but the incremental cost of the upgrade was $400 per seat. Exchange was selected to ıreduce disruption on the desktopı and for its integration with existing Microsoft applications. The network is administered by one person with backup from another employee with other responsibilities. The cost of the upgrade seems small when compared to the parallel upgrade to Office 97/Window95 and new desktop investment: $400 for Exchange versus $2,500 per person for the larger upgrade. The transition also involved expanding from a Novell-only environment to the use of Microsoft NT servers. About $50,000 was spent on training (1.5 hours per user) and configuration. Since the Exchange system was implemented last October, the company has only experienced one outage of four to five hours resulting in overall uptime of 99.7 percent.

Publishing Company
1,850 clients
The company migrated from Exchange clients with MS Mail backend to Notes/Domino earlier this year. TCO wasn't studied because it was considered strategic for the company to have the right applications platform for the future. Lotus was deemed advantageous because of the ease with which applications can be developed for operating systems, including the Mac, and wide availability of off-the-shelf applications. Uneven performance of Binary Tree migration tools as well as at least 100 users with mailboxes in excess of 100 MB prompted the company to dump, rather than migrate, Exchange mailboxes and address lists. Hardware and software cost $800,000, including five clusters of two servers for high reliability. Average server uptime is now in excess of 99 percent; clustering typically prevents users from realizing that any single server is down. The network is administered by four dedicated positions. Most of the migration occurred over a seven-week period. Administrative training cost $10,000 to $15,000, and on-site consulting cost approximately $1,000 per day.

Schlumberger, New York, Paris, Tokyo, Sugar Land, Texas
Manufacturing and Oil Exploration and Production Services
David Sims, Technical Manager, Information Technology
More than 30,000 e-mail clients (in 90 countries)
At the end of 1993, Schlumberger migrated from Digital Corp. mail systems to an open architecture primarily based on QUALCOMM Eudora clients and a wide variety of servers. About 75 percent of clients are Eudora, about 15 percent are Exchange, and about 5 percent are Notes. The mail backbone standard is SMTP and POP. No formal TCO study was done for this migration, but savings were substantial. Scheduled downtime is rare, and unscheduled downtime stands at about .0001 percent. Schlumberger has a ratio of about 100 users per desktop support person. Server load in this highly decentralized organization can range from as little as five to 1,500 (30 to 1,500).

U S West Communications Group
Telecom company
More than 37,000 clients
Barbara Bauer, Senior Director for Corporate Systems Development
Beginning a year and a half ago, U S West migrated from about a dozen e-mail systems to twoıNetscape and Lotus Notes/Domino. TCO, including hardware and software, support, administration and helpdeskıover three years is $91.84 annually per Netscape user. About 25,000 users rely on Netscape for E-mail, while Notes usage has shot up from about 1,500 clients to 12,000 as part of the deployment. The extremely low TCO for Netscape is attributed primarily to three factors: hardware and software purchase price (servers comfortably accommodate up to 1400 clients) and minimal training. ıThe majority of groups downloaded Netscape from the server, registered themselves and took off with absolutely no training. There was a Web page with frequently asked questions and that's the limit of training.ı Netscape availability is 99-plus percent and downtime is only scheduled to install upgrades (about two in the last year). Two people provide Netscape support.
TCO for Notes application scenarios is still being analyzed following server consolidation efforts. However, individual groups rely on ROI (return on investment) studies to justify Notes deployment. Notes typically requires greater training and administrative support than Netscape, and Notes' uptime statistics are slightly lower than Netscape's. Notes training typically starts at half a day and ranges upward, depending on departmental requirements. U S West is now experimenting with more open collaboration alternatives to Notes. ıNeither Notes nor Exchange is a fully open, standards-based product, and this limits the opportunity to integrate these products easily into existing application portfolios of different technologies. Aggressively moving these products to fully open, standards-based capabilities would ensure continued and broader use in large, complex, heterogeneous technical environments. Without this change, Notes opens the door further for emerging competitive products.ı We can use Notes Pump, but ıit's awkwardı and data most often gets converted from Notes to Oracle Corp. environments in production applications.