Messaging and Collaboration Server Market Share and Trends

In an IBM press release last week, it was suggested that Lotus Notes/Domino has taken a bite out of Microsoft's market share in the corporate messaging arena. Maybe it was just to draw attention to this week's Lotusphere 2009 conference. Microsoft has replied with a press release done as an interview with their own David Scult, a General Manager in the Information Workers division, entitled Making Sense of the Messaging and Collaboration Market.

Lotus is still big in the enterprise market. As IBM indicates, Lotus Notes/Domino is used in over 50% of the largest 100 companies in the United States. Microsoft notes that Lotus was once in 2/3 of the Fortune 100, so 50% is not as impressive as it sounds. All the while, Yahoo!'s Zimbra Collaboration Suite claims to have sold over 20 millions client licenses over 30,000 companies.

The IBM article claims that Lotus has experienced solid growth for several quarters. That is believable certainly. Lotus Notes 8.x and Domino 8.x represent a great step forward, especially on the Notes side. The Notes client has drastically increased its usability. What is challenging to believe is that the gains that Lotus has experienced is somehow greater than the increases witnessed by Microsoft with Exchange Server.

Identifying software market share is not an exact science. It is a combination of vendor sales numbers, company surveys and some semi-informed analysis. Is there a guarantee that firms are being honest in answering surveys? When a company moves from one application to another, do the licenses no longer in use get deducted magically from the vendor's claimed total? Do the vendors share accurate sales information? Is market share based on number of user/client licenses? Number of companies that have invested in the product? Number of servers? What if we only count companies with more than 500 users?

Overall, the Exchange vs Notes market share debate seems more of a marketing public relations exercise than an accurate assessment of messaging solutions deployed in the market. It reminds me of the classic book "How to Lie With Statistics" by Darrell Huff (it should be part of the high school curriculum). Personally, when faced with a choice of products, I like vendors to focus more on the benefits of their own product and not maintain a primary marketing strategy of denigrating the competition.

Interestingly, the Microsoft Press Pass interview lists Coca-Cola Enterprises as an Exchange Server customer and the IBM press release boasts that the Coca-Cola Company is a Lotus Domino client. I wonder if those are the same?

William Lefkovics