Hundreds of IBM employees, including those in India, faced disruption in accessing their email over the last couple of days. This happened as the US major is migrating from its current Lotus Notes email system to a new communication environment, according to sources aware of the development.
This move comes 1.5 years after the company sold Lotus Notes, along with select other products, to HCL Tech in December 2018 in a $1.8 billion deal.
According to a statement from an IBM spokesperson, “Some IBM employees are experiencing email service delays. We are working to restore full service as quickly as possible, and we are leveraging a variety of alternative communications tools to ensure minimal disruption to our clients and to our business while we work to restore full email capabilities.”
IBM did not respond to Moneycontrol’s detailed query on what went wrong and if the disruption impacted its business.
However, sources shared insights on what happened.
What happened?
A senior IBM executive explained that the disruption happened as the company is now moving to a new communication environment from Lotus Notes, and that had been made available to 3.5 lakh employees across the world.
The migration process, the executive said, was accelerated in the last 1.5 months. This was on account of an agreement with HCL Technologies where IBM was allowed to use Lotus Notes software for a certain period after it was sold to the IT major.
“We had an agreement with HCL Tech, where for a period of time, IBM will be able to use Lotus Notes without paying license fee to HCL tech. That was till June 30, 2021. If we don’t move from today onwards we will have to pay for licenses to HCL Tech for using the Lotus Notes software,” the executive explained.
While the company moved the critical applications that were running on Lotus Notes on priority, this was not the case with other applications such as email services.
The executive explained that the company has been developing internal email communication tool Domino, which requires more testing and so people were being moved only in a phased manner since server and other system configurations need to be changed.
However, as the deadline approached, hundreds of people started accessing the system at the same time causing outages and delay in email communication, the executive said.
While most employees were unable to access their work emails for a day or two, post which it was restored, many continue to face delay in receiving emails.
Even as IBM is now working fast to restore the email communication and establish alternative tools for communication, it is not clear if the company will license Lotus Notes from HCL Tech till it solves email migration issues to the new environment.
Both IBM and HCL Tech did not respond to Moneycontrol’s query on this. It is also not clear if HCL Tech was involved in the migration process. A query sent on the same did not elicit any response.
Criticism
The issue with migration has not gone down well with industry experts.
“It has been more than 48 hours and it is a major disaster. It is not just a small percentage of the company, but the entire workforce was affected,” said one of the industry sources, who tracks the company and did not want to be quoted.
This especially comes in the last day of the quarter, and half a year ending, a critical time period, for enterprises. “It has really messed up planning. In hindsight somebody should have seen this coming,” said the source.
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