After the Wall Street Journal wrote an article about IBM Notes, it seems that there are some other news organizations have picked up on it and have spinned it into another direction. The “not too favorable” direction. For example, VentureBeat writer Dylan Tweney has another view:
IBM has more modern social-media software, too, but only makes about $55 million per year from that segment of its business. So the challenge for IBM is to continue milking as much revenue as it can from Lotus, while gradually shifting the branding and the revenue to newer, sexier lines of business. One example: Renaming its annual Lotus conference, Lotusphere, as “Connect2013.” Yeah, that’ll help.
We’ll be watching to see if the earnings report sheds any more light on IBM’s efforts to turn Notes around. But as for me, I’m not holding my breath.
Gregg Eldred 
Gregg,
It surprised me that with all the investment that IBM has made in IBM Connections that their annual revenue is $55 million/yr for IBM Connections and related products.
I’ve always heard via the rumor mill that Connections wasn’t making any money. But, as Richard points out, $55M seems a meager amount when compared to Notes/Domino (which I’m presuming is the $1B).
You have think that the executives at IBM have bet on the wrong horse here. And if this is correct, bet very, very badly.
I wonder why he didn’t revise the story after earnings were released.
Ed, I think that we all know that getting corrections out of a media outlet is hard and few and far between. 🙂
Without knowing any details the 9% (and more) could as well all be revenues from the Kenexa acquisition.
And Connections makes lots of money with a relative small amount of customers. Much better than little money with lots of customers.