One thing with a tight community like our is that good news spreads quickly. Yes, there are times when news should be kept quiet and it is. But when news spreads, it always spreads quickly.
So it’s already an open secret on social media that HCL’s acquisition closes today (June 30th) of Domino, Connections, BigFix, AppScan, Unica, Commerce and Portal. Since HCL became involved with Domino there has been a resurgence. So those in the know were all excited when an acquisition was announced late last year. Yes, there have been some doom-mongers (by the way, does anyone know why I didn’t get a response to my polite query about what constitutes of tidal wave of customers moving to Microsoft as a result of the acquisition?). But the signs have been clear and the enthusiasm of ex-IBMers evident from last year’s first HCL Factory Tour has been echoed by the enthusiasm of social media posts over the last few days from IBMers joining HCL tomorrow.
The time with IBM and ICS has brought a lot of opportunities for those who were still able to earn their living from the products. Both myself and Tim Malone became IBM Champions. Thanks to my lifetime award last year, that’s an honour that will continue for me. But HCL and Digital Solutions will give more opportunities. We’ll be aiming to repeat the honours also at HCL with the HCL Masters program. We’ve both spoken at user groups and I’m sure we will again. And there will be a host of whitepapers and infographics. And we’re already in the planning phase for our next webinar (stay tuned for that!).
It’s an exciting time, but also one with a lot of challenges. It’s time to double down on the efforts of recent years. Now the hard work really begins.
Do you think XPages will still be enhanced in the future, or is HCL planning to move us to node.js leaving everything behind as is?
Discussions between the community and HCL/IBM regarding XPages have been ongoing for a long time. It’s hard to say how XPages skills and code will be leveraged. XPages proved too complex for some Notes developers and is unlikely to grow the developer base in a way that will satisfy managers and CIOs. DMA addresses some of the use cases of XPages, in some cases (offline use) surpassing them. But some still currently remain, particularly around externally-facing web applications. XPiNC promised a lot, but Mozilla stopping development on XulRunner and inability to run Java natively on iPad made that more difficult. All I can say for certain is negativity and bitching from the community won’t achieve a positive outcome. For that it needs reasonable and cost-effective possible solutions. The lack of a definitive answer thus far shows there are no obvious ones.