Article: Why LAN-Based E-Mail is Obsolete

OVERVIEW

The basic technology of LAN-based e-mail is, for all practical purposes, obsolete. With no vendors, including Lotus, fully behind this technology, the conclusion that there is a limited future in LAN-based e-mail is inescapable. For Lotus cc:Mail, the long-standing champion of LAN-based e-mail systems, the inevitable is still some distance away. With 14 million cc:Mail users, there remains considerable momentum behind this technology and a substantial market. How viable that market is, however, will certainly be impacted by customers planning to migrate away from cc:Mail since this will progressively reduce IT investment. Third-party product and service support for cc:Mail can also be expected to diminish since an expanding share of a shrinking market does not justify long-term investments on the part of vendors.

What is important for IT decision makers is focusing on making the right decisions, and the right investments, for the future. Many IT decision makers are faced with a variety of factors including that other property of physics: inertia, one definition of which is the property of an object at rest to stay at rest.

This article delves into the reasons why, other than the lack of vendor support, LAN-based e-mail is obsolete and provides much of the data that IT decision makers need to start the process of planning migration from cc:Mail to a client/server messaging platform.

MAKING DECISIONS ABOUT MESSAGING

IT decision makers face not only a barrage of trends, studies, products, technologies, white papers, rumors in the press, vendor information, and vendor misinformation, but also the inevitable, visionless proponents of the status quo both within and outside their own organizations. Chief among these, paradoxically, is Lotus' own messaging division which, although future development of cc:Mail has been terminated, makes every effort (other than future product plans) to persuade its customers that cc:Mail remains the right choice for messaging both now and in the future. At the same time, the rest of IBM is actively promoting migration away from cc:Mail.

In making decisions about messaging, customers currently using LAN-based e-mail systems need to clearly understand their current environment, their requirements, and their options. It is important to have well-defined short and long-term strategies. In most cases, the e-mail decisions customers make today will determine the IT infrastructure they will build on for at least the next 3 to 5 years. Lotus, Microsoft, Netscape, and Novell are battling it out in the messaging arena because they understand that the winner in messaging today will be the owner of tomorrow's IT infrastructures. Interestingly, this is why Microsoft counters Lotus' groupware-oriented strategy with a messaging-oriented strategy. Microsoft understands that if they own the customer's infrastructure, they will have the years ahead to build groupware technology.

INTEGRATED IT SERVICES INFRASTRUCTURES

Both the software industry and corporate IT have moved away from separate e-mail, document management, databases, and other applications deployed over file servers and workstations towards universal standards-based client applications (Web browsers and standards-based e-mail clients), running against common, integrated IT services infrastructures providing a variety of applications and data to users throughout the corporate enterprise. Integrated IT services infrastructures are provided through the deployment of common server technologies such as Lotus Domino and Netscape/iPlanet servers. These technologies represent a variety of capabilities but what is more important is that they represent powerful, flexible development platforms for client/server applications.

No LAN-based e-mail technology provides a comparable application development platform for groupware (or intranet/extranet) applications. Although various kinds of data can be programmatically circulated through a LAN-based e-mail system, LAN-based e-mail systems do not provide a robust, feature-rich development platform for business applications, e.g., groupware and intranet/extranet applications. Ironically, it was in part the demand for improved reliability brought on by the growing role of e-mail systems as enterprise-wide information engines that has most contributed to the obsolescence of LAN-based e-mail technology. In any case, tomorrow's IT infrastructures will not be built on LAN-based e-mail technology.

Groupware, as compared with simple e-mail, represents a set of collaborative and other business applications, potentially available enterprise-wide, provided through a common, integrated IT services infrastructure. Most companies are choosing Internet, intranet, and extranet technologies as the framework for their integrated IT services infrastructures. Products like Lotus Domino and Microsoft Exchange increasingly offer support for Internet standards-based technologies. Other products, such as Netscape/iPlanet servers, are natively standard-based. While Lotus has become known for "groupware," Netscape has become synonymous with "Internet, extranet, and intranet." Both of these technological approaches are examples of integrated IT services infrastructures: common technologies provide a variety of applications and services enterprise-wide.

Compared to Lotus' and Netscape's groupware and intranet/extranet offerings, Microsoft's Exchange system is more focused on messaging. While Lotus and Netscape are both providing a relatively complete and highly extensible set of capabilities to customers, Microsoft's rather blunt strategy is to win market share through messaging, including support for Internet standards-based messaging technologies. Microsoft, however, has two basic strengths: (1) a strong client/server messaging platform, and (2) the promise of groupware bolstered by its bare essentials: calendaring and scheduling and forms capabilities. Customers that build their infrastructures on Exchange are not getting everything today that Lotus and Netscape customers already have.

THE INFRASTRUCTURE GAP PROBLEM

Most businesses using LAN-based e-mail technology today face an infrastructure gap between file server and client/server systems. The technological sophistication of a businesses varies as a function of its industry or vertical market and of its geographical location. Some LAN-based e-mail customers do not currently have the network and workstation infrastructure in place to implement client/server messaging systems.

The majority of the 14 million cc:Mail users are currently using cc:Mail versions prior to Release 6 (cc:Mail database version 6 or DB6) and Novell NetWare file servers. Partly because cc:Mail versions prior to Release 6 are not Year 2000 compliant, over 50% of cc:Mail customers will commence upgrade or migration before the year 2000. This means, however, that many customers will have to deploy new servers and upgrade workstations and networks. In many cases, investment in migration, rather than upgrade is compelling.

Exacerbating the infrastructure gap problem is the fact that the majority of cc:Mail customers are running Novell NetWare which, despite the incursion of Windows NT, currently represents roughly 4 million servers (79 million users) worldwide. Nonetheless, many applications that were once based on file-sharing technology have migrated to client/server systems or have been discontinued. The trend in file server-based e-mail and collaborative technologies is clearly towards client/server platforms. Historically, this has ruled out NetWare mainly due to the proprietary NLM programming environment.

As an aside, one historical strength of Windows NT has been that developers, not products, are portable from Windows 3.x. Although they claim 20,000 developers, Novell has never had a following comparable to that of Microsoft. Lotus counts 18,000 Business Partners but this does not include IT shops developing on Notes and Domino in-house (very few IT organizations have in-house NLM programmers).

Novell is combating the trend away from file servers with Internet standards-support and a variety of new server products but it remains to be seen whether or not Novell can cross the divide. In the mean time, IT services once provided by file servers continue to migrate to application servers. There is little indication that Novell's product plans will significantly impact this trend where messaging and collaborative applications are concerned. Windows NT Server and UNIX are far and away the preferred server platforms today.

LAN-based e-mail technology may well remain appropriate for many environments but many businesses will be forced to adapt by incorporating new technologies into their business process in order to remain competitive. The good news is that advanced capabilities will become increasingly accessible and competition assures customers of steadily improving products. However, this does not solve the infrastructure gap problem.

In many cases, customers using cc:Mail versions prior to Release 6 (cc:Mail database version 6 or DB6) will see a superior return on investment by migrating away from cc:Mail rather than upgrading to cc:Mail Release 6 or above. Customers already running Release 6 or above (cc:Mail database version 8 or DB8) can afford to wait but will eventually migrate to other systems for several reasons. One of these reasons is that without vendor support, cc:Mail products cannot keep up with Internet standards-based messaging technology. In fact, they are already behind, lacking support for HTML which is universally supported (HTML is supported natively in Notes and Domino 5.0).

STUMBLING BLOCKS TO MIGRATION

For cc:Mail and other LAN-based e-mail customers the infrastructure gap between LAN-based e-mail and client/server solutions like Domino and Exchange is the largest stumbling block to migration. Netscape's messaging solution represents a middle-ground in terms of infrastructure and, like Domino, provides a groupware development platform of its own: natively standards-based intranet and extranet technology. However, Netscape does not currently offer the same range of groupware capabilities as Domino. The Netscape/iPlanet server offerings are more a toolbox for Internet, intranet, and extranet application development than an out-of-the-box solution.

Aside from the infrastructure gap, the momentum of cc:Mail, and the inertia of established IT organizations, the main hindrance to migration is financial justification. It is difficult to make a business case for infrastructure investments. New infrastructure will normally cost more than the expected return on investment based on any particular application. Generally, the cost of a groupware infrastructure cannot be justified based on e-mail alone. Nonetheless, the cost of workstation, server, and network hardware will make upgrades, and e-mail migration, increasingly attractive as the cost of adequate hardware declines over time. At the same time, pressure to migrate will mount due to the lack of enhancements in cc:Mail.

The Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for various e-mail systems has been studied extensively, most notably by Gartner Group. Studies from Zona Research, CNI, and others, corroborate Gartner's results with respect to LAN-based e-mail versus client/server systems although they do not agree with respect to which solution has the lowest overall cost (or with respect to how these numbers should be calculated). LAN-based e-mail technology has the highest administrative overhead as compared with client/server systems and there is a relationship between (1) cost of software per user; (2) number of users per server; and (3) number of administrative staff per n users. LAN-based technologies are the most expensive while systems such as Domino, Exchange, and especially Netscape, are the least expensive.

Like Moore's Law for silicon, computer and network hardware improves in orders of magnitude, although not as quickly as memory technology. The price/performance ratio brings buyers more computing power and faster networks at the same price in constant dollars every year. Many cc:Mail customers don't have the infrastructure in place, or the budget, to migrate to Domino, Exchange, or Netscape today. However, from a technology perspective this evolution is already happening. The cost of the hardware and networks necessary to support client/server messaging and groupware solutions, eventually, will no longer be a barrier even to the smallest customers.

There is of course a time differential where less technologically sophisticated vertical markets and less developed regions of the world are concerned and this will persist for some time as LAN-based technology continues to be used by smaller businesses, in less technologically sophisticated vertical markets, and in less developed regions of the world; spreading in a ripple-effect until it has ultimately expired. The next wave, however, is already in motion. IT decision makers must decide how long to ride out the LAN-based e-mail technology ripple-effect before catching the next wave.