A Whitepaper for Corporate Decision-Makers

Why Organizations Are Migrating from IBM Lotus Notes to Salesforce.coms Force.com Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)

An Independent Analysis Published on Behalf of salesforce.com.

White Paper

Why Organizations Are Migrating from IBM Lotus Notes to Salesforce.coms Force.com Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)

Executive Overview
The business world is rapidly changing, and old systems and software are not equipped to address organizations escalating demands. Legacy applications were not designed to support an increasingly dispersed and dynamic workforce, and are too cumbersome and costly to respond to the changing nature of the workplace and the rising expectations of end-users and corporate executives alike. Not only are the applications and systems inadequate to meet changing requirements, but the development platforms which enable them are also being challenged. As a result, a growing number of corporate decision-makers are abandoning their unsuccessful legacy collaboration systems, and are moving their operations to the cloud, taking advantage of a new generation of more powerful, flexible and economical web-based, on-demand resources to achieve their business objectives. Salesforce.com has been at the forefront of the cloud computing movement. It popularized the idea of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) which enables organizations to acquire and utilize enterprise applications build on a multi-tenant architecture and offered on a pay-as-you-go basis. Salesforce.com has also pioneered a broader array of Cloud Computing solutions, including enterprise-class collaboration and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) which are transforming the way organizations develop and deploy business applications. These cloud-based solutions are specifically designed to meet the needs of an increasingly dynamic and tech-savvy workforce which is increasingly willing to self-provision and develop business applications which satisfy their day-to-day needs. Rather than feel threatened by this newly empowered workforce, enlightened CIOs and IT organizations are embracing this trend and encouraging their corporate executives and endusers to take advantage of enterprise-class, cloud-based PaaS alternatives which can satisfy their demands. These robust alternatives are often called Cloud2 solutions. Cloud2 solutions go beyond the first generation of Web-based applications because they are designed to be mobile and social, providing access via any handheld device and the ability to obtain feeds, follow records, real-time updates, among other dynamic features. These social and mobile qualities are the key differentiators of the new generation of Cloud-based business apps. Many of these CIOs and IT organizations are adopting salesforce.coms Force.com PaaS and its Chatter enterprise-class collaboration solution because of their proven functionality, scalability, security, performance and rapid time to value. One legacy software application, and associated development platform, being particularly TM challenged by the business benefits of Force.com is IBM Lotus Notes . This whitepaper will discuss why organizations are increasingly migrating from legacy applications and platforms like Lotus Notes and moving to more powerful and economical SaaS and PaaS alternatives like those offered by salesforce.com. We will also present a series of customer success stories about organizations which have left Lotus Notes for Force.com to obtain the business benefits from the cloud.

THINKstrategies, Inc., 2011

www.thinkstrategies.com

p.2

White Paper

Why Organizations Are Migrating from IBM Lotus Notes to Salesforce.coms Force.com Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)

The Escalating Importance of Agility in the Enterprise

Enlightened business executives recognize that the competitive landscape and nature of the workplace have dramatically changed. Globalization and mobility have placed new demands on organizations to find better ways to communicate and collaborate internally and externally. Intensifying competition and an increasingly dispersed workforce, as well as partner ecosystem, have made it imperative that successful organizations adopt more powerful, yet cost-effective collaboration systems. Figure 1 summarizes the key challenges confronting organizations of all sizes and driving them to adopt more powerful corporate collaboration tools. Figure 1 Key Challenges Facing Organizations Today

Organizations need software and systems which can respond quickly to these escalating demands. They also need software development tools which enable them to more easily cater their applications to meet their specific business needs in a rapid fashion so they can gain a competitive advantage.

A Brief Overview of Force.com

Salesforce.coms Force.com PaaS enables organizations to develop and customize business applications quickly and economically on a multitenant architecture to meet their unique requirements. Force.com is a cloud-based, on-demand PaaS that gives developers and business users a fast path to convert their ideas into an operational application, without infrastructure and development delays. Force.com makes it faster to build, easier to use, and less expensive to manage business applications than traditional platforms like Lotus Notes or Microsoft .NET. Force.com also includes features which are especially conducive to meeting the expectations of todays workers who are attuned to the ease -of-use and robust functionality of search, tagging, forms, self-service reporting and social feeds within their web and mobile apps.

THINKstrategies, Inc., 2011

www.thinkstrategies.com

p.3

White Paper

Why Organizations Are Migrating from IBM Lotus Notes to Salesforce.coms Force.com Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)

Force.com users dont need to download and deploy any software or manage any servers to build and maintain their business applications. All they need is a browser. Force.com has also made integration easier, with a growing array of certified adapters for most middleware tools and a proven web services API which supports over 200 million integration transactions per day. These functional benefits translate into significant financial benefits. Force.com enables companies to focus on being innovative and agile to keep pace with a rapidly changing business environment rather than spending time building and maintaining infrastructure and worrying about security, network performance, databases, user provisioning, backups and disaster recovery, and a myriad of other traditional data center and software development issues. Doug Menefee, CIO, Schumacher Group has stated, "We found in building applications on top of Force.com, I only need one administrator for every four administrators that I would have needed for an on-premise solution."

Why the Time is Right to Leave Lotus Notes Behind

Lotus Notes was unveiled in the 1980s based on an academic data-sharing system 1 developed in the 1970s, called PLATO Notes . The problem is that the fundamental architecture of Lotus Notes hasnt advanced significantly since the 19 90s when Lotus released an HTTP server add-on, called "Domino", that allowed documents to be rendered as web pages. Specifically, its distributed architecture has resulted in a proliferation of servers and replication of data that brings with it a number of security, management, and reporting challenges. While Lotus Notes may have been revolutionary when it was first introduced, it is definitely showing its age as users and administrators find it increasingly costly and time-consuming to maintain, and unwieldy to use. A Lotus Notes deployment often required an army of outside consultants and months of development work, and often resulted in lower usage and enduser satisfaction than expected. Force.com is proving to be a very compelling option for disgruntled Lotus customers. The Force.com platform enables organizations to develop and extend applications faster, easier and less expensively than traditional development platforms, like Microsoft .NET. In fact, Nucleus Research found that developers on average could deliver applications 4.9 times faster on Force.com than on Java or .NET. An IDC report also found that building applications on Force.com took 85% fewer developer hours and cost 54% 2 less compared to traditional development. As a result of the systematic limitations of Lotus Notes, a growing number of its customers are looking for a more productive and cost-effective alternative. In many cases, their efforts to migrate to a new platform are being accelerated as IBM will 3 stop supporting Version 7 (and earlier) of Notes this April, 2011.

1 2

History of Lotus Notes in Wikipedia. Force.com Cloud Platform Drives Huge Time to Market and Cost Savings, IDC. September, 2009. 3 IBM Lotus to End Notes/Domino 7.x Support, (http://www.lntoolbox.com/en/categories/ibm/151-ibm-lotusto-end-notesdomino-7x-support.html)
THINKstrategies, Inc., 2011 www.thinkstrategies.com

p.4

White Paper

Why Organizations Are Migrating from IBM Lotus Notes to Salesforce.coms Force.com Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)

Customer Successes Migrating to Force.com

Here are just a few examples of customer success stories which should give IT and business decision-makers confidence that moving to Force.com can produce real returns.

Perceptive Software
Perceptive Software migrated from Lotus Notes to Force.com in June, 2010. Ive been involved with Lotus Notes for 15 years, but the skill set needed to maintain the apps is getting harder and harder to find, stated Neale Wooten, Manager of Information Systems at Perceptive Software. The companys IT staff of only four people moved 20 applications with 70 back-end databases from Lotus Notes to Force.com, built their own customer portal, and integrated it with their financial back-end in only 4 months, a month ahead of schedule. According to Wooten, The migration was probably the highlight of my career. It was the biggest project Ive ever taken on, with the smallest team, the most amount of records, the shortest timeframeand it was probably the cheapest and the smoothest rollout Ive ever experienced, We finished our rollout 1 month earlywith zero bugs. Were handling cases faster because were more efficient, and were getting more cases because our Force.com applications are easier to u se. Wooten goes on to say, The most valuable benefit is the 360-degree view Salesforce provides of our customers and prospects. Moving to Force.com gave the power of reporting and dashboards to the users. So, our internal customers are pleased we replaced Lotus Notes with Force.com. Wooten adds, After we rolled out Force.com, my job became much easier because the platform is easy to maintain and I dont spend time justifying it. Force.com lets me speed up my release cycle. We can put something in the development environment on a Monday and it can hit production by Wednesday,

ASCAP
ASCAP moved to Force.com in July, 2010. Prior to the move ASCAP was using 21 Lotus Notes databases which were not integrated with anything else, or each other. According to John Johnson, ASCAPs VP of Licensing, "Force.com is the fastest path from idea to application, without infrastructure and development delays. No longer do we worry about upgrades, new releases, and compatibility. Now, management has a way to see everything. We have the freedom to innovate and solve business problems on-demand." Johnson also listed the following tangible business benefits, We built our Force.com apps in less than a week. We cut laptop preparation time by 94% when we moved from Lotus Notes to Force.com. Our pipeline measured by the number of prospective licenses increased 400% after we moved from Lotus Notes to Force.com. After moving from Lotus Notes, we no longer wait weeks for a report because Force.com dashboards show us the data in real time.

THINKstrategies, Inc., 2011

www.thinkstrategies.com

p.5

White Paper

Why Organizations Are Migrating from IBM Lotus Notes to Salesforce.coms Force.com Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)

Yara International ASA

Yara is a global provider of agricultural and environmental products, and is the world's largest supplier of fertilizers. The company is headquartered in Oslo, Sweden, and employees 7,600 workers in more than 50 countries. Yara continuously invests in innovation to maintain its industry leadership, and has a corporate culture based on the core values of ambition, teamwork, trust and accountability. Yara's original collaboration system consisted of a database within Lotus Notes which wasnt meeting its needs. According to Marjo Kernen, Senior Finance Consultant at Yara, The Lotus Notes database was obsolete. It was inflexible and therefore was unable to adapt to changes in the market. We also thought it was a rather difficult solution to work with and there were quite a few security issues. The cloud based architecture of the Force.com platform was important to us. By working in the cloud, we were not dependent on the new IT infrastructure that was still to be built at the time. Force.com provides us with a clear overview of our investments and allows us to share this data globally across all departments of our company. This enables us to offer better service to our customers. Yara decided to implement the Force.com solution in two stages. The data that was used most within Yara, such as applications for investment management or customer account administration, were transferred from the old database to salesforce.com during the first stage. A few months later, this information was transferred to the Force.com platform. The entire implementation was performed centrally . That is a huge advantage for an international company such as Yara, with branches in over 50 countries. As a result, we could quickly deploy Force.com in the entire organization and then teach administrators, at each site, to work with the solution. Yara now has more than 420 users working on Force.com globally. Kernen reports, For me as an administrator, salesforce.com's Force.com is a lot easier to use than the old Lotus Notes database. We now have the flexibility to quickly respond to changes and we can easily implement new company processes in Force.com. Furthermore, fewer mistakes are made, because many of the processes have been automated. We can monitor all activities well, which has also led to major improvements in the area of security.

Conclusions
Todays challenging economic environment and competitive landscape is making it imperative for organizations of all sizes to move to a more social and mobile environment that encourages greater collaboration internally and communication with their customers and partners. Organizations must build more flexible and robust business applications to respond to these escalating requirements. Legacy systems, such as Lotus Notes, were not designed to respond to todays challenges. Force.com is a powerful and more cost-effective alternative. It is not only easier and more economical to use, it also provides greater functional capabilities to meet the Cloud2 social and mobile requirements of organizations of all sizes in a secure and reliable fashion. THINKstrategies believes IT and business decision-makers should seriously consider moving from Lotus Notes to Force.com for the following reasons: ease of use, time to value, ease of integration and administration, and centralized governance.

THINKstrategies, Inc., 2011

www.thinkstrategies.com

p.6

White Paper

Why Organizations Are Migrating from IBM Lotus Notes to Salesforce.coms Force.com Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)

This independent analysis was sponsored by salesforce.com.

About Salesforce.com
Salesforce.com is the enterprise cloud computing company. The company's portfolio of Salesforce CRM applications, available at http://www.salesforce.com/products/, has revolutionized the ways that companies collaborate and communicate with their customers across sales, marketing, and service. The companys Force.com platform (http://www.salesforce.com/platform/) helps customers, partners, and developers quickly build powerful business applications to run every part of the enterprise in the cloud. Based on salesforce.coms real-time, multitenant architecture, Salesforce CRM and Force.com offer the fastest path to customer success with cloud computing.

About THINKstrategies, Inc.

THINKstrategies is a strategic consulting services company formed specifically to address the unprecedented business challenges facing IT managers, solutions providers, and investors today as the technology industry shifts toward a services orientation. The companys mission is to h elp our clients reTHINK their corporate strategies, and refocus their limited resources to achieve their business objectives. THINKstrategies has also founded the Cloud Computing Showplace (www.cloudshowplace.com), an easyto-use, online directory and resource center of SaaS, PaaS and IaaS solutions worldwide, organized into over 90 Application, Industry, Service and Enabling Technology categories. The Showplace also includes information and insights regarding industry best practices. For more information regarding our unique services, visit www.thinkstrategies.com, or contact us at info@thinkstrategies.com.

THINKstrategies, Inc., 2011

www.thinkstrategies.com

p.7