Prescient insights from Redmonk's James Governor:
"Good enough" -- used to be a pejorative at IBM. "Good enough" is what those upstart competitors offered customers, upsetting finely honed pricing and sales models for feature-rich systems and software products. Generally IBM products suffer from an excess of features, rather than a lack. I often joke that IBM never met a feature request it didn't like.I have felt for a long time that there is a segmentation that can be done in most organizations to offer different classes of service to different types of users. Every other industry does it. IT is finally headed in that direction as well.
So what about Lotus? Two major new Lotus strategies are now about good enough...
So Lotus is now going to market with good enough messaging, where IBM explicitly admits in some cases that Google has more functionality. That's a big change. A change that should benefit enterprise customers: overprovisioning software, and paying through the nose for it, has been the story of the industry, well, forever. Open source turned the dial; IBM learned an awful lot about good enough from Linux. SaaS turned the dial again. And now IBM is starting to explicitly play the good enough game.
Link: James Governor's Monkchips: Lotus Knows: IBM Strategy is "Good Enough" >
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Tripp Black http://www.mindwatering.com | 10/16/2009 10:08:25 PM
@1
We have customers (not including ourselves) who don't using clustering. However, they almost all use something "enterprise", especially directory assistance (DA)services for your CRM application to be a secondary directory to send mail easily or for AD or a business partner. Then there is Tivoli Directory Int. so that we can sync directories and passwords. Just about all our non-express customers tend to use part if not most of the "enterprise" licensing.
We ourselves are a small shop we use DA for our CRM and multiple web site domains and anonymous access, and authenticated client access via reused temporary ids to send and receive test applications and artwork with us.
I agree tiered structure of pricing(although not always in the products themselves) provides opportunities at many levels. Some of which IBM may have been missing.
The flip side is, from an IT perspective, some of it when run internally requires the basic infrastructure no matter what you are running so the differential is not as obvious, aside from price per license.
But until one can license Domino Enterprise Server, yet only pay for mail users who don't use apps, compared to those who want clustering, this problem never goes away.
We always need to pay for Enterprise, even when all they might want is mail, but clustered mail.