Get the most from Notes®

There is no need pointing out that times are tough.

Everyone - and I mean everyone - is trying to find ways to reduce costs and save money (simply consider that both houses of our congress here in the USA actually agreed to cut down the total tab on the national stimulus package!)

Which leads us to Lotus Notes.

As a technical director at Teamstudio, I have had the privilege to visit a lot of client sites and seen a lot of different Notes environments - some of which being absolute models of efficiency - while others were, well, not. In almost all of these cases, however, nobody really realized (or at least wanted to acknowledge) exactly how inefficient their organization's Notes infrastructure was until they went to analyze it prior to or during a major project.

But what if we could actually quantify how much that ‘less-than-efficient’ Notes environment is costing the company in terms of lost productivity or actual $$? What if I could tell you how to reduce costs and save money in your IBM Lotus software environment?

Curious? Want to hear more? Well, here's my take...

Part I

Let's consider a ‘typical’ Notes infrastructure - and some ‘typical’ pricing.

This is example pricing only and not a commitment to sell the software, hardware or services at these prices! (You know what your actual costs are.)
PVU information from IBM.
Example pricing from Dell.

• Domino Server Maintenance: $10.95 per value unit (PVU), per year (50 - 100 PVU’s per processor core, e.g. Intel Xeon Quad core = 200 PVU’s, $2,190.00 )
• Intel Itanium dual core: 200 PVU’s, $2,190.00 per year
• Lotus Notes client Maintenance: $49.95 per year
• Lotus Notes Designer Maintenance: $228.00 per year

OK, here’s the deal. Let's take a look at ‘Customer A’ (which is taken from a real customer and environment statistics). Customer A has the following:

• 20 Lotus Domino Servers (all Enterprise for simplification), all Intel Quad Core processors: Annual maintenance on these is (20 x $2,190) $43,800.00
• They have 990 Lotus Notes Client licenses: Annual maintenance on these is (990 x $49.95) $49,450.50
• They have 10 Lotus Domino Designer Client Licenses: Annual maintenance on these is (10 x $228.00) $2,280.00

Total annual maintenance for this environment: $95,530.50

Across these servers there are approximately 900 non-mail applications in an unknown state of use, meaning we don't know if they're being used or not - and if so, by whom and how often.

We assume that Company A has 3 Administrators and 7 developers on staff (yeah, it is wishful thinking, but let's think of it in terms of ‘best of all worlds’). If that’s the case, here are the salary costs for administrators and developers:

Administrators

• 1 Sr. Administrator - $90,000.00 per year
• 1 Administrator - $75,000.00 per year
• 1 Jr. Administrator - $60,000.00 per year

Developers

• Sr. Developer - $80,000.00 per year
• 4 Developer - $60,000.00 per year (total: $240,000)
• 2 Jr. Developer - $40,000.00 per year (total: $80,000)

Total salary to support this environment: $625,000.00

The Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of this Lotus Notes/Domino environment is $720,530.50 per year! That's almost three quarters of a million dollars! That is a lot of money. (NO Microsoft is NOT cheaper. Don’t even go there).

Part II

When looking at the TCO amount for Company A ($720K+), there’s GOT to be a way to make that number smaller - or at least do a heck of a lot more with it! Well here is what you have been waiting for.

We at Teamstudio provide a service called Asset Analysis. This is a professional service offering that we have offered for several years to help customers with a number of challenges including IT governance issues, Domino upgrades and mergers and acquisitions. Asset Analysis works like this: we look at your Lotus Domino environment, analyze all of your databases, and provide you with a comprehensive report containing the information you are looking for - along with recommendations - you need to consolidate these assets and save money! That information might be obsolete domain names, hard-coded server names or a number of other items important in your environment.

There you go. Simple and to the point. To show you how much can be saved, let's revisit Customer A.

Let's say we performed an Asset Analysis, and the resulting report shows that Customer A has 275 active Notes/Domino applications across their 20 servers, and that these applications can be consolidated onto only 8 servers. This translates into quite a bit of savings - the first is in Hardware maintenance: consolidating 20 Domino servers down to 8 will save $26,280.00 (12 x $2,190) in annual Lotus Domino Maintenance costs.

Obviously, fewer servers and applications means fewer people needed to support the environment. But before you think I'm advocating laying people off - which I certainly am NOT - let's consider what additional resources we are freeing up...

• 1 Jr. Admin Salary: $60,000.00
• 2 Developer Salaries (2 x $60,000): $120,000.00
• 1 Jr. Developer Salary: $40,000.00

So the second chunk of savings is in support: $220,000.00
(By the way, this does not take into consideration using these newly freed resources to work on more pressing issues - like developing and streamlining existing applications to improve efficiency to gain an even more impressive ROI.)

Total annual savings in your Domino budget ($26,280.00 + $220,000): $246,280.00. Wow!

If you want to learn more about how this service works and what we do to get this information, we recently presented a webinar covering Asset Analysis that is available on-demand. The session was led by Matthew Fyleman with Rocky Oliver. The talk discussed how to prepare for major changes to your Notes environment - like upgrades or server consolidations - and how Teamstudio can help you make sure you’re really reducing your infrastructure costs and saving the money your organization needs - right now.