So... IBM or not IBM ?

I have just read through all the posts on the blog and overall, except for a few negative or doubtful comments here and there, most of the bloggers and commentators seem rather impressed with what IBM has to offer.

We are already an IBM shop, albeit an old rusty crumbly shack of a shop. Like it or not, Lotus Notes works for us and our much hated Notes databases are a pillar for many of our units. We are very heavily dependent on Sametime and many teams, specially in Mars IS, would not be able to function without it. Imagine trying to run an Atlas upgrade without Sametime.

Now with the emergence of Enterprise 2.0, we are investing a lot of effort into leveraging other types of collaboration software to help the business work better together. Social software, blogs, wikis, forums, you name it and we want it. And we want it not only for "traditional" Mars, but also for all the organisations that Mars has and will be acquiring. The tools are out there, the question is then, who do we get them from.

Do we go start from scratch and invest in an all Microsoft environment? Sounds like a lot of work & a lot of money. However future acquisitions of Mars are likely to be in the SME area and stats show that the majority of the organisations in this space (bingo!) are on a Microsoft platform rather than an IBM one. If we were to move to Microsoft, integration or even absorption of new acquisitions would become easier and much cheaper.

Do we do Best of Breed and invest in industry-strength integration to force these different best bits into continued seamless co-existence? Hmmm. Is there a need for Best of Breed in Mars ?

Or do we stick with IBM and tap into this fully integrated seamless solution we could just naturally expand into from our current Lotus base? IBM's offerings presentation slide is almost an exact copy of the Mars requirements presentation slide that has been circulating over the past year. Donald? ;-) IBM has everything we think we need. Sticking with IBM would allow us to then focus our attention on the more difficult task which is to bring about that culture shift that will encourage our users to use these tools that we are rolling out.

To be fair though, one argument I keep hearing in favour of IBM is that traditional Mars is 2 times bigger than non-traditional Mars and therefore moving away from the traditional IBM environment in Mars will cause more user disruption than the other option. This is not strictly true : regardless of which direction we move to, we will be upgrading part of our user base and migrating the rest. Either way, the whole user base will be hit with a round of training and some inevitable disruption while they get used to their new IW.

What it all boils down to is cost vs. benefits for each of the scenarios that are open to Mars in this area. An objective and fair evaluation of what Mars would need to invest with each vendor to achieve the 1-Mars vision should help us make the right decision for Mars. This work is currently underway ... watch the space.

Still, I agree with Gartner that the whole debate about IBM/Microsoft sort of misses the point. The time is to assess the viability of checking out the cloud. But this is another blog entry for another time!