IBM Watson

IBM Ushers in the Next Phase of Application Development with New IBM Domino, Designed for Today's Agile, Digital Business

Global businesses, including A1 Telekom Austria, Polish Medical Air Rescue, Teradyne, VCC and Vössing, are using IBM Domino to boost collaboration and productivity  


By Bob Schultz, General Manager, IBM Watson Talent and Collaboration Solutions
October 9, 2018
 

Today, IBM is announcing the availability of the next generation of its Domino Platform (“Domino V10”), ushering in the next phase of rapid application development for today’s digital businesses. Domino’s platform, database, and app dev tools are fast and relied upon by businesses to automate important processes. Global organizations across industries, including A1 Telekom Austria, Polish Medical Air Rescue, Teradyne, VCC and Vössing are experiencing positive business results using IBM Domino.

Since Domino was released 29 years ago (December 1989), it has been a critical application platform that businesses — from banks, insurance and communications companies — use in offices, ships, helicopters, and even oil rigs.  Domino has been chosen by business and IT developers alike for decades to help build solutions with embedded workflow that can automate their business quickly and effectively.

Domino V10 is the first installment in a reinvigorated Domino platform roadmap which represents the input of thousands of clients, IBM Champions and Business Partners globally for both application deployment and enterprise mail.

Global Organizations Across Industries Embrace IBM Domino

A1 Telekom Austria, a leading provider of telecom services in Austria, aimed to empower sellers to work together on high-value activities like relationship-building to drive its billion-dollar business, but siloed data and repetitive reporting tasks stood in the way. To address this issue, A1 created a sales pipeline management application based on IBM Domino, enabling it to automate time-consuming reporting tasks and centralize its data on sales opportunities.

"IBM Domino is at the heart of practically everything our people do, whether it’s our pre-sales teams calculating on costings and working on tenders, our post-sales teams helping to fulfill orders, or our managers overseeing the entire process," said Georg Schaller, Sales Information Management Leader, A1 Telekom Austria. "The new mobile support capabilities in Domino V10 will be a game changer for employees, since the majority of A1's sales representatives use iPads while working remotely with prospects."

Polish Medical Air Rescue’s IT and Radio Department set out to transform their organization from an analog company to a modern, digital and flexible organization — with the help of IBM Domino. The organization is responsible for transporting injured individuals, many of whom are accident victims in need of timely care, to the nearest health facility. To ensure the team was first to the scene, the IT department looked to IBM Domino to help them improve response time — reducing the time between an initial call for help and when the Air Rescue team's helicopters arrived at the launch pad. Since implementing Domino, the team reports it has improved  many critical processes and tracking procedures, some of which were previously completed by hand. For example, the IT department created a tool, called Air Field, to change helicopter status (in flight, on duty, on return, etc.), but after years of use, it evolved into a new solution. Now, the organization can find out how long it will take to fly to a specific location, how much fuel is needed, how to balance the aircraft based on crew members weight and more. 

“Every day, our organization is responsible for transporting injured individuals to critical care facilities, and in these situations, every moment counts,” said Maciej Paczesny, IT Manager and CIO, Polish Medical Air Rescue. “Since implementing Domino, we have seen a 30% increase in flights per day, missions per year and patients rescued — thanks, in large part, to the systems we created on IBM Domino."

Teradyne,  a global leader in developing and supplying Automatic Test Equipment, aims to help customers get maximum value from its products and nurture their loyalty. To help with this mission, Teradyne wanted to connect them with fast, effective support — but its customer portal was difficult to navigate. Using Domino, Teradyne transformed its customer-facing and internal portals with IBM Collaboration Solutions, making it easier for employees to provide customer support, and for customers to access information. In fact, Teradyne saw a 40% increase in one customer’s satisfaction with search on the new portal, and also saw a 10x reduction in transfer times for product firmware updates, boosts customer experience. Watch a video here.

Fabrice Langlois, IT System Architect at Teradyne, said: “Domino Apps on an iPad is huge news for us. I won’t have to rewrite apps and can easily mobilize them.”

VCC, a construction management firm, has found that on multi-million-dollar construction projects, even short delays can drive up costs. Daily, VCC would ask: How could their enable on-site engineers to collaborate quickly and efficiently with decision-makers at its head office? To address this issue, VCC worked with IBM Business Partner Prominic.NET to develop a mobile app for its IBM Notes and Domino business systems — enabling managers and remote workers to collaborate seamlessly. Business benefits reported by VCC include up to 40% improvement in employee productivity by offering mobile access to information; up to 30% more efficient project management helps keep construction projects on track; and reduced risk of costly project delays and deliver high-quality services

Jerry Horani, Chief Technology Officer at VCC, said: “We have relied on IBM Domino applications to drive our business for many years, and we’ve always been extremely satisfied with the solution and support, because so many of our mission-critical applications depend on IBM Domino.”

Vössing, a German civil engineering company, has hundreds of engineers working with customers and partners on thousands of infrastructure projects worldwide. Instead of implementing typical ERP, CRM and HR solutions from the market, in 1998 the company decided to create its own business execution and controlling applications based on IBM Domino. Today, this business decision and strategy has led to excellent results, including 100% customized business processes, high toolset flexibility and low total cost of ownership. Watch a video here.

Bernd Gewehr, IT Manager, Vössing, said:  "Domino is an absolutely brilliant solution with extremely fast results, low costs, and operational stability — I don't remember a Domino downtime in the last 10 years. Domino has allowed our small IT team to become smart."

Five Ways Businesses Can Benefit from Domino V10

Leveraging DominoV10 can help businesses:

1. Lower the Total Cost of Ownership of running business applications:

  • Auto-repair of database clusters, and greater index resiliency. Increase of database and folder limits.  
  • Ability to publish Domino statistics to New Relic and other application monitoring tools so administrators can spot trends and identify the need to upgrade to new hardware, or which application to optimize, or spot any performance bottlenecks.   
  • SAML federated identity provider configuration enhancements for easier SSO integration, e.g. now supporting ADFS 4.0, plus improvements to Domino’s own ID/Vault management.  
  • Support for CentOS lowers license costs immediately, as its community-driven free software. CentOS can be used to create Docker Domino containers as easily as Red Hat Linux (or Windows), so clients can deploy Domino solutions on-premises, hybrid, and public — wherever makes sense for business.

2. Future proof Domino-built applications with the world’s most-used programming language1 — JavaScript brings a community of 4.5 million developers, and thousands of open-source libraries together with Domino developers to help enhance, integrate, and easily build new applications using Domino data and any available REST APIs on a full web stack:  

  • Integration with any node.js environment via the domino-db NPM and Domino App Dev Pack using high-speed GRPC protocol.2  Domino App Dev Pack 1.0 is available for early access on the existing Domino V10 Beta Forum. 
  • Access to any REST API from within Domino’s scripting language, LotusScript, using industry standard HTTP commands such as GET, POST, etc.
  • Ability to read, write and manipulate data coming in and out of Domino as JSON documents using LotusScript’s new JSON parser object.
  • Domino Query Language (DQL) added to Domino to support a native node.js programming model that’s also accessible from the Domino command line, or any Domino API.

3. Create “mobile-ready solutions” from desktop Domino-based apps for millions3 of boundary workers, executives and road warriors with a new client solution called IBM Domino Mobile Apps for the Apple iPad without any new development effort.  

  • The same Domino application can access the same data, business logic, user experience, data replication and robust security as the desktop application with no configuration necessary on Domino V10 server.  
  • You can leverage your existing application investments and works either online or offline, so you won’t be hampered by the lack of connectivity whenever and wherever you are working.
  • Enhance those applications with the iPad experience including turning access to the smart tablets’ GPS and camera capabilities in your solutions.
  • IBM Domino Mobile Apps will be available soon to clients when they upgrade to V10 and are on IBM subscription and support at no extra charge. Beta access is available now.

4. Deliver more flexible calendar management for individuals and teams, new mail sending and alerting features, touch screen support for Microsoft Windows Tablet devices and calendar interoperability with Microsoft Outlook with IBM Notes 10.0. Also offering new capabilities such as:

  • User Experience: A new workspace with custom color themes, a new date picker, font style preview and collapsible left navigation. Updated import and export file types including Microsoft Excel.
  • Mail Features: Forward multiple messages as attached EML format files. Improved mail sending policies and user notifications. By Sender mail view and secondary signature for forwarding and replying. Schedule when messages are sent via delayed delivery.
  • Calendaring: Team calendar to help with the management of resources with configurable team inbox. Forwarding of meeting invites by attendees to others and make it configurable. Copy message content into New calendar entry option.

5. Optimize your Domino deployments using three compelling options – CentOS, Docker and the IBM Cloud designed to help lower data center costs and complexity:

  • Domino V10 now supports CentOS, which can help lower costs immediately as its community-driven free software. Also, CentOS can be used to create Docker Domino containers, so you can deploy your Domino solution on-premises, hybrid, and on the cloud — wherever it makes sense for your business.
  • Built on the IBM Cloud, IBM Domino Apps on Cloud (DAC) combines the advantages of a public cloud with a dedicated, hosted private cloud solution for clients running their Domino apps securely. Since IBM maintains, supports and monitors the Domino environment, using DAC can lower your TCO by 20-60%6. 

In October 2017, IBM signed a strategic partnership with HCL Technologies to increase commitment to the Domino product family – Domino, Notes, Sametime and Verse – and to begin delivering on the roadmap to release version 10 of the Domino portfolio in 2018. Today, together with HCL Technologies, IBM is delivering on that promise.  To join in on the discussion and excitement on how “Domino is back,” use #dominoforever on Twitter and Facebook. “We are not done; we are just getting started!”

To follow the rolling thunder of announcements about the Domino portfolio, visit: ibm.com/destinationdomino.

 

Sources:

1 – Stack Overflow survey – https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018#technology
2 – The IBM Domino AppDev Pack and domino-db NPM will beta on October 10, 2018
3 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPad
4 – https://turtleblog.info/2018/06/29/how-to-build-your-first-node-js-app/
5 - https://www.ibm.com/blogs/collaboration-solutions/2017/10/25/ibm-announces-investment-notes-domino-version-10-beyond/
6 – Based on internal IBM testing. In IBM TCO analysis approach, IBM looked at input parameters such as number of applications, number of servers, clustering requirements and criticality of applications. IBM then fed these parameters into a TCO model that uses cost assumptions from a standard Domino on-premises environment. IBM’s calculations show a total cost of ownership savings of between 20 to 60%.

 

Disclaimer – IBM’s statements regarding its plans, directions, and intent are subject to change or withdrawal without notice at IBM’s sole discretion. Information regarding potential future products is intended to outline our general product direction and it should not be relied on in making a purchasing decision. The information mentioned regarding potential future products is not a commitment, promise, or legal obligation to deliver any material, code or functionality. Information about potential future products may not be incorporated into any contract. The development, release, and timing of any future features or functionality described for our products remains at our sole discretion. Performance is based on measurements and projections using standard IBM benchmarks in a controlled environment. The actual throughput or performance that any user will experience will vary depending upon many factors, including considerations such as the amount of multiprogramming in the user’s job stream, the I/O configuration, the storage configuration, and the workload processed. Therefore, no assurance can be given that an individual user will achieve results similar to those stated here.