Sunday, November 1, 1998

Upgrading to Notes and Domino R5: an investment in your future

THE LOTUS POSITION

By Gail Shlansky

In today's highly competitive environment, organizations rely on a rich, robust messaging infrastructure to gain the benefits of increased responsiveness, enhanced service and better, faster decision-making. But as the scale and importance of messaging within your company grows, so too does the risk that budget overruns and missed deadlines can nullify the benefits they deliver.

In response, Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) has become an aspect of costing enterprise messaging applications such as Lotus Domino. The TCO process identifies costs and creates a framework for managing them. Beyond the business benefits of controlling costs and increasing efficiency, TCO-focused products may help IT organizations manage the process of software acquisition, configuration, training, and administration, while reducing costly downtime.

From Lotus' perspective, Domino and Notes have long been leaders in TCO. Core enhancements in Domino R5 are designed to help you manage the costs, and lower the TCO of your critical messaging infrastructure.

Acquisition

Domino leverages your investment in your current infrastructure by working with what you have, and growing as your company's needs and demands grow. Lotus believes Domino R5 supports more leading operating systems than any other solution in its class, and integrates tightly with all of them. It supports Windows NT, Sun Solaris SPARC and Intel Edition, IBM AIX, HP-UX, IBM OS/2, IBM OS/400, and IBM OS/390. The Domino family of servers differs from competing products in part because it doesn't lock you into a certain environment that may become inappropriate as your needs grow and change. With Domino, you have the best of both worlds--tight OS integration, without being dependent upon the next, stable, release of an OS for added functionality.