United Kingdom’s largest food producer and manufacturer, Premier Foods, is dropping IBM Notes and Domino for Google Apps for Business.
… Premier Foods has made a significant investment in Google Apps for Business, dropping Lotus Notes for its 5000 strong user base. The motivation here was to increase the ability to collaborate across multiple sites, including 40 factories spread across the UK. Vickery says:
“The collaboration element grabbed us. We are working better because of the collaboration aspect. We’re using Drive. Choosing it for email was just the way in. Collaboration is changing the way that we work as a business.”
The fact that Notes was replaced by Google apps was exciting in itself and got users to take an interest in the potential of the cloud, he adds:
“The Google thing is interesting. Lotus Notes isn’t the most exciting brand in the world, so when you say, ’I’m going to give you the next release of Lotus Notes’, it’s not that exciting. Google however grabs interest.”
Gregg Eldred 
I think this is pretty old news being recycled
The fact that they say “Lotus Notes” shows how far behind they are with IBM Notes. Wonder if they even know about all the great new things in Notes and Connections?
Steven:
Wonder if they even know about all the great new things in Notes and Connections?
There in lies a problem. I would venture to guess, based on how it is handled in the US, that Premier Foods wasn’t visited very often, if at all, by IBM. So, if they aren’t seeing their IBM reps, how would they discover the “great new things?”
The problem with articles such as these is that they do not tell you if IBM was even considered when they were evaluating their options.
Finally, let’s face it: IBM is on to the newest shiny thing: Verse. All other products are pretty much set by the wayside. Although, in this situation, it would seem to me that Verse *might* have saved the account for IBM. But only if someone from IBM made the effort to talk to the customer (again, things like that are never mentioned in articles like this).
Oh, and you can see that the “Lotus” name has bad connotations in the market. IBM should have killed that name long ago.
Thanks for the comment.
Totally Agree with you Gregg!
The fact that they say “Lotus Notes” shows how far behind they are with the Product. What about all the new good stuff and Connections all the rest?
And I’d wager the IBM sales team did nothing, if they even cast an eye. After 12 quarters of slump, I think it would be more important to keep customers. This sort of thing boils down to your sales team and how they are motivated. Micosoft has proven you can sell a vastly inferior product if you push your sales team to do it. IBM has a better product, but seemingly no desire to sell.
“Like”
Thanks for the comment, Brian.
Greg, Many of your posts are echoing/re-posting articles about companies migrating off of Domino. As if there isn’t enough bad press already, re-posting it certainly doesn’t help any of us, your colleagues that work with the product or the companies that use it well. Just yesterday, a customer asked me how should we go about getting off of Notes? Not “should we?” but “how do we?” The thing is they run their office on mission-critical custom apps that work really well for them on Notes, web browsers and mobile devices. They are integrated with their email marketing and other systems. It is also used for a secure extranet website. They love Traveler. It would cost them a boat-load of money to throw away and reproduce all this using other technologies. When I explained that, they decided it made sense to keep using Domino.
Some have said that they will move because of Office365 licenses and then they get email, sharepoint and its all in the cloud! And at the end of the day, will they be better off after paying so much money?
I know of an international company that moved to Exchange and were going to migrate their apps as well. To date, they still use the applications on Lotus Notes R5 !!!!!!! Too expensive to move across…. but at least they have Outlook …. whooopppeee
Don,
I created a “simple” database years ago to help me manage my team. It’s over 20 years ago now. I left that company. The database is still being used @ a major appliance company. – They are trying to create its likeness using Java and Oracle. But don’t’ have the time to create all the bell’s and whistles it had built into my database. I love Notes. I don’t understand how they allowed the product to stagnate so badly.
I love Lotus Notes – The workflow. My current company is killing off Lotus Notes and my previous Job- they killed notes last year. What was interesting is before this the company I used to work for used the heck out of Notes and workflow. We had databases up the wazoo and we used them to help us keep deadlines and be more efficient.
– All gone. I don’t care for sharepoint. And see not progression toward another product that a layman could actually create a template and workflow scheme – w/o a ton of programming.
I would like to know what really caused the exit from notes. Was it cost, support, all of the above?