Why would companies move to Lotus Foundations? What are the key factors that would lead organisations to invest in a comparatively unknown technology to support their critical business processes? Here are four case studies of organisations which moved their IT infrastructure to Nitix:
1. Tina Gasperson wrote an article about the Freedom Partners network of car dealerships moving from Exchange Server 2000 to Nitix. The key pain points were overcoming the limitations of Exchange being tied to Windows workstations, creating a VPN to link geographically remote sites and the ability to control employee web surfing.
2. Frederick’s Appliance Center in Redmond, WA had two old Microsoft Windows servers and two Cisco routers, and needed webmail, file sharing, and a reliable backup solution. The off-the-shelf Windows server solution that Frederick’s initially considered was much more expensive than NitixBlue. The installation of NitixBlue took only ten hours and requires little ongoing work to manage.
3. No names were provided for this case study for a bank and its branch office in rural Ohio which had been using a dedicated $1,200-per-month 56k line to stay connected. Nitix provided employees at both locations with email, Internet access and a VPN protected with server-based email virus protection. In addition, the Vice-President of the bank must now approve all websites that anyone attempts to visit, so no unauthorized or potentially dangerous sites are available. In 12 to 14 months, the bank paid for the entire upgrade through its savings alone.
4. Swish is a chemical maintenance supply company based in Peterborough, Ontario with 13 locations across Canada. The costs involved in keeping every office connected with a frame relay system was costing $1,200 per month, per office. Other significant benefits of Nitix for this company were firewall, email and anti-virus. Return on investment for the cost of Nitix Net Integrators was six months and for the entire implementation was just over two years.
soapboxmode
My point in listing these companies was to show that the common factor for all of these case studies wasn't just email and it certainly wasn't collaborative applications since Lotus Domino wasn't in the picture at all. The moral of the story is that Lotus Foundations is first and foremost a small business server with an abundance of technical riches and that is how Lotus needs to market it. Any Domino consulting that comes from the client afterwards is a bonus.
/soapboxmode
Tomorrow I’ll be posting the story of a company that decided to move from Nitix to Windows.
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3 comments:
We have an MS 2003 infrastructure with Active Directory. We are considering migrating onto a foundations server. Is there a step by step guide about how to migrate completely, including file shares. I've seen an article on how to make the Foundations server replace the Domain Controller and migrate over user accounts, but nothing about how to move file shares and other services (e.g. DNS).
Hi Roland,
The Lotus Foundations Server technical library is quite comprehensive since Nitix has been around for over ten years (September 1997).
Probably best not to have the complete discussion on-line in this blog since I'd need to ask some technical questions about your setup and we don't know who's reading. Have a chat to IBM in Canada and they'll introduce you to a local Business Partner. Dangle the prospect of selling some Foundations licenses in front of the Business Partner and I'm sure they'll be happy to do the research for you.
Thanks, we've got a P.O. into a BP now. Are there any forums that customers can access on Lotus Foundations or its predecessor?
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