Yellow for Less Green

Unfortunatly I will not make it to attend DNUG this time. I guess this will be an interesting conference, and I wonder what Lotus executives will have to say about what is happening in Lotus land.

I guess IBM will announce to do things different. Regarding marketing we see some serious efforts made with the Smart Work campaign.

Still I think most of the non IBM / Lotus customers do not get the story. Maybe we will hear more about this tomorrow in Düsseldorf.

What we definetly will here about tomorrow is a special promotion for Lotus products with a significant 25% discount on new licences and reinstatements. Reduced prices will be available for a few months. IBM hopes to win back lost Lotus customers back into maintenance mode – and to win new customers from the dark site who are facing yet another large renewal bill for evil products like Exchange in Micrsofts fiscal Q4.

From my perspective there are two kinds of customers in the first category: The customers who discontinued maintenance will not reinstate, because they are happy with the pre-Notes 8 releases and they want to avoid upgrade of clients. Marketing will have to do a good job to convince these customers.

The second kind of customers are very happy about Notes 8, but they have maintenance and will not buy new licenses – because they simply don´t need to because business does not grow in these times.

In the second category it will be a hard sell too. License costs are only a small part of the budget for choosing a new messaging and collaboration infrastructure. But in some cases it might help.

In Germany we call this “Abwrackprämie” – a scrappage program for MS licences. Maybe 25% discount is real good argument ;-)

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