Apparently they didn’t have anyone there who really knew Notes/Domino.
The effort to upgrade 500 users and servers can be done by one person …….. PART TIME !!!

What very few of these reports has made clear is that even after Hamilton Beach migrated their Lotus Notes mail to GMail, they still have Domino servers for applications. That means they still need Domino servers and staff to support them, and they still need to upgrade these servers to the newer release to maintain support.

So what are the real numbers? Lotus Notes for 500 users will come in no more than $50,000. Lotus Domino Enterprise for 10 servers — I don’t know how many Hamilton Beach has, but that should be more than enough — will come in at around $25,000. That’s $75,000 per year for Notes and Domino licensing, which I agree isn’t exactly chump change but that’s a worst case scenario. Google Apps Enterprise is $50 per user, or $25,000 for 500 users.

That leaves a licensing gap of $50,000, but keep in mind that Hamilton Beach still needs Domino servers and Notes licenses so they still have to pay that licensing cost. The most they could have done is decommission their mail servers, but they only needed two for 500 users and that’s only if they have them clustered (and it doesn’t sound like they did). That’s $5,000 for licensing plus the hardware savings. None of the labor savings can be realized since they’re still using Domino.

If you add the Domino licensing and two servers amortized over five years I figure Hamilton Beach will realize savings of at most $7,000/yr. If you expand the topology and assume they have five field offices with mail servers, and each office has two servers clustered, that’s still only $35,000/yr. Adding back in the $25,000 they’re now spending on Google Enterprise they’re only saving $10K/yr, but it’s most likely costing them MORE! The $180K/yr they are claiming is only achievable when you include a huge swath of expenses that weren’t really eliminated.

So for a net savings of at most $10,000 per year they spent seven months doing a migration to a new mail system. They still have go to through the Domino and Notes upgrade, they still have to pay for the Notes and Domino licensing, and they still need all the same staff. Does that sound like it’s worth the hassle?

I’m not saying the migration was a pure political play with no real ROI, I’m just saying the numbers do not add up and the claims being made cannot possibly be correct based on the information Hamilton Beach has provided. Until I see something that says otherwise I’m calling BS on it.