On October 30, 2018 IBM sold a portfolio of technologies to HCL (including Lotus Notes) for $1.8B ends an era that started when they purchased Lotus in 1995 for $3.52B. This has been a long time in the making as the market moves more functions to seamless cloud services and how 480 of the Fortune 500 now subscribe to Microsoft Office365.
As we move into 2019 the ‘race to zero’ in the cost of email has marginalized the fatter-client and large-datacenter-footprint of Notes. But there are decades of information, documents and attachments that require reconciliation and put through a migrate (to Google or O365) /purge/archive decision tree. There is governance, risk, compliance and retention needs that need to be considered without losing the context of the email body and chain of communications.
Many organizations have turned on their next generation environments like Office365 or Google and just kept Lotus Notes running. The expense to just keep it running is perceived safer than being the ‘Notes Undertaker’ and reconcile the complexity of that old environment. But hardware breaks, drives fail but more importantly over time the software running the machine become out of service, a security risk and unsupported because the wrong person retired. As outlined by Gartner, there needs to be an ‘Application Undertaker’ to help properly retire and completely decommission legacy technologies.
Platform 3 Solutions brings the expertise and tooling to help make this conversation easy. With Archon, from Platform 3 Solutions, the ability to seamless connect, analyze through machine learning the unstructured aspects of what exists, having the data movement threads to remove what is important and place the results in an open, XML-based repository is a reality.
