DomBlog.de - Notes, Domino and Stuff

1 - die waren auch bei uns.

Es war Alles im Ordnung (Lizenzen), aber die Art und Weise wie die aufgetaucht sind und die Drohungen war das Letzte.

2 - I have had conversations with people at medium to high levels within Lotus Software and IBM about this, first as a customer then as a business partner. I can say with certainty that the outrage is reaching people who could do something about it if they chose. I hadn't heard of any major issues in the last year so I was hoping it had gotten better.

3 - In US, we had an audit by IBM as well last year and it was performed by a "non-affiliated" third party of IBM's choice; deloitte & touche.

No mention was made of the strategic alliance between IBM and D&T but it was obvious from the start (reference has since been removed from their website but you can still google it).

Specifically, they requested information, which does not appear to be relevant to how many licenses we purchased, in addition to presenting security concerns. Following are some samples of the requests:

A complete Active Directory export of users (seriously??)
A complete CSV export of the Domino Directory
Question regarding how often we contact IBM for support/upgrades
Question if we develop in-house or outsource
Question what the approximate breakout of servers (Unix/Windows/Other)
Question how we purchase IBM products (directly/reseller/both)
Request for specific information, such as Domain name

They were fishing for services rather than performing a software audit considering their push for a fast turnaround. We didn't give them any of that information by the way.

Adding insult to injury, the audit was a joke. The auditors did not know what they were doing and were VERY ARROGANT. Robert Bastian from IBM even threatened our business partner who was trying to help (ie: you'll never do biz again if you don't step aside)! CIO was NOT happy.

That event is weighing very heavily on the current Notes vs. Outlook discussion currently taking place.

In all my years working with Lotus products (>15 years), this is the first audit I've ever heard of by them. Our local IBM/Lotus rep was not even aware of it.

BTW, after a complete waste of time, we were NOT out of compliance. According to IBM management, they are doing this "routine compliance review" to everyone.

Epic fail on IBM's part as this could be approached so many different ways.

Good luck to anyone out there because you have no choice but to comply (or else).

4 - We were audited last year, due to a processor usage that ended in "50", i.e. we had an odd number of server cores. Apparently that throws a "red flag".

The IBM rep (actually from IBM) contacted us, and we explained that we had a single-core dev machine that we use to exagerate performance bottlenecks in code.

No big deal there, I could see how that would be a concern. But what was a bit annoying was they had to bring in 3 other people over 2 extra calls to verify that our subsequent usage was proper (we have Utility Server Express licenses and apparently nobody we talked to really knew how that worked).

5 - Oh, this reminds me on our audit, which was in March 2007.
Unfortunately KPMG wasn't able to complete the audit of such a hughe Business Partner like I am until today. At least the last message to me was that they'll come back to me after they've rated all the documents. Seems to be tough job

But it's not funny if you loose customers and projects because of such a silly behavior!

6 - This reminds me on an audit in 1999 which was similar to this one. Must be part of IBM's new business model

7 - with the complexity of all vendors licenses its always possible to find something.

just upgradering the CPU in a server can result in huge bill , so keep the old 2 core machines around if you count PVU and performance is as it should be.

8 - Another reason why CPU/PvU based licencing *MUST* be made a a thing of the past. This over complex and archaic way of measuring the 'value' of software to an organisation has no relevance in these days of cloud-based, SaaS and on-demand IT services.

9 - @9 I don't really see the relevance of the video to this blog entry (or am I missing something?). The client license repackaging was a great thing to do by IBM but that's not the point.
I was simply trying to get some attention for the way the auditors have been behaving and maybe get someone to change that.