ABC & BPOS

ABC (code name ;-) are currently migrating to BPOS. I had a few "informal" chats with the ABC delegates and they also presented one of the sessions. My notes so far :

• About 130,000 users in about 120 countries
• About 30,000 Notes apps (my heart goes out to them)
  
• Migrating to BPOS (45,000 users moved so far)
  
• Migrating ALL of their history across
  

Not unlike ourselves, ABC have "strategic" rather than cost-driven justifications for their migration to BPOS. Without going into the details, they tell us the experience so far has been good and is progressing on track. They share their lessons with us :

• Do not neglect the deskless option - this can save companies significant amounts of money (up to 3/4 the cost of licences per user)
• Do not assume that the existing infra will necessarily support cloud services (existing AD's, networks). They have had to spend a few millions on revamping their existing AD to suit BPOS requirements.
• Rationalise the application strategy. I do not believe our friends are using any co-existence technologies and it appears from what they told us that most of their apps are based on the same template. Like us, they have not included any budget in the migration programme to migrate their Notes apps - they are leaving it up to Business Units to fund such migration as and when required, between now and 2011. However, they already know that come 2011, they will be under pressure to review the 2011 timeline and will be asked to postpone it : ) They have however already reduced SLA's on the Notes apps (eg. only broke-fixes will be attended to, no CIPs, contained env, pretty much the same as we are planning)
  
• Consider Sharepoint carefully. We get one chance at rolling it out, one chance to get the governance right.
  
• Personalise, do not customise. (Not that we have the option to anyway!)
• Realise that this is a learning curve for our favourite people-ready vendors too. They are still learning from us customers how to deliver SERVICE vs. SOFTWARE.
• It takes time to understand where the boundaries are as far as operations is concerned. Indeed, BPOS is almost a black box solution and it will be important for us to understand clearly how much control we have over ensuring minimal business disruption.
• We can choose to migrate history, but remember that without history we can migrate whole sites (thousands of users) overnight. With the data migration route they have chosen, their deployment plan has stretched out over 18 months.
• They recommend we have a cloud exit strategy. Their strategy is to consider another cloud vendor as a 1st option and to bring back the services inhouse as a last option - the main reason being that most of their savings have been through re-organising (rightsizing :-) their workforce around the cloud solution and should they have to bring the service back inhouse, they would need significant recruitment and reskilling.
• They ran a business change programme in parallel with the technology programme. The BC programme encompassed training as well as championing of the new platform by a significant number of users in the business.

They also had a challenge getting the cloud concept past Security in their company. I think for us, it is important to realise that with the new cloud services, we also have new functionality that we will be deploying, eg. Outlook Anywhere, which will no doubt increase our security risk as an enterprise. However, as one of the Security consultants at the conference said, Security Management is not necessarily about locking down the fort completely, it's about knowing where the potential holes are so that we can mitigate the risks (eg. through training users) and if we can't mitigate the risks, at least we'll know what we need to worry about :-)

Speaking to ABC was for me the most value-added exercise of the whole day. Great advice and I have been able to secure some "offline" time with the head of migration as well as their programme manager where they will talk us through their challenges/reco's/gotchas etc. We've also been invited to join a user forum that has been set up between companies that have migrated to BPOS so far. The forum includes some big names which I will not post here otherwise I'll be told off :p Something to look forward to! (the forum, not the telling off)