Corporate Messaging Solutions

This space has largely been dominated by Microsoft and Lotus all the time, so no exceptions this year. The only exception is that Novell GroupWise couldn't make it to the club. Novell had been struggling to remain in the club for the past two years, but this year it finally moves out. We have however tracked its in our brand shift matrix. Linux continues to remain with the same index of 11 as last year. Since there are so many messaging solutions available in Linux, be it Sendmail, Qmail, Postfix, we clubbed them all as one.

Brand loyalties for both Exchange and Domino are fairly strong, since their deployment requires significant investments. Moreover, both platforms compete with each other in terms of greater functionality. Interestingly, nearly an equal percentage of existing owners of both brands want to shift to the other. This is a mere 6-7%, so nothing to worry about for either brand. Novell does need to pull up its socks, because not only did it move out the Users' Choice Club but a significant percentage of its existing customers want to shift to either Domino or Exchange. Last year, most of GroupWise traffic was moving only to Exchange, but this year, it's moving to Domino too. Linux isn't taken as a separate category in the brand shift matrix because messaging solutions on Linux are many and it didn't get too high a UPI either. So we've combined the votes for all other solutions and analyzed them. 

The news for the other brands isn't very pleasant, and brand loyalties are fairly low for them. They all plan to shift to either Domino or Exchange. Unfortunately, hardly anybody in the others wants to move to GroupWise. Compared to last year, we're seeing both Domino and Exchange consolidating their positions further. They further reduced whatever small number of customers were shifting over to the other platform. 

Brand Shift (%) 2003

Among regions, the West is largely dominated by Domino. 50% of those who responded from the West said they'd like to go for Domino. The remaining three regions are all dominated by Exchange. North and south face stiff competition between the two for votes, while in East, Exchange has a clear lead over Domino. 

Exchange dominates across different industry verticals. The only place where it faces stiff competition from Domino is in the

BFSI segment. Everywhere else, Domino was the second preference. In the votes by company size, Exchange leads over Domino in the lower end of the spectrum (companies having up to 250 Crores turnover). Amongst large enterprises, there's stiff competition between the two.