Rob's Blog

27/1: Is Lotus Notes/Domino Expensive?

Lotus Notes has endured much pressure from Microsoft over the years since MS started their attempt to produce a Notes Killer.  I believe that without IBM, Lotus would not have survived.  If Notes had gone the way of Lotus 123 (in my view a better spreadsheet than Excel), that would have been the end of Lotus.

However, I believe that the product is better than ever and Outlook/Exchange is being seen as a weak alternative that provides just email whilst Lotus Notes/Domino is so much more.  IBM have just announced figures of 125,000,000 licenced users!

But Lotus Notes is perceived as expensive in the marketplace.  I think that this stems from the fact that Outlook comes bundled with Office whereas the Lotus Notes client requires an extra licence.

Big corporations benefit from big discounts based on the number of seats that they buy.  Where does that leave the smaller companies?

The price of Lotus Notes/Domino for companies of less than 1000 employees is actually dirt cheap.  They benefit in what IBM calls Express Licencing.  I'll give you an example.

A company of five people each wishing to use Lotus Notes for email and other applications with a Lotus Domino server would pay just $133 per person (just $665) and that would include a Lotus Domino server.  That's as cheap as chips and it includes one year's maintenance too!

If they just wanted to use mail then that would be only $96 per person.

If you needed to use Lotus Domino for an internet application where people register and then login when they return, the cost is only $2500 per CPU so only $2,500 for a single processor server and you can have any number of users logging on using a browser with no CAL required.

Is this IBM's best kept secret?  The actual page on IBM's site is here.