Some very active threads floating around Domino blogs at the moment, such as
this one from Carl Tyler and
this one from Volker. I'd like to be able to chime in the odd comment relating to Domino consulting in New Zealand, but I don't know how indicitave it would be of the market trend. That is to say, there seems to be the odd job or two going here and there for the larger consulting companies, but not a lot of opportunities to leave any reason for smaller players to exist in the market. Some of this seems to be related to the way New Zealand works -- for any medium to large international business, NZ is a spoke site, and we're seeing more and more of those spokes being managed by their central hub, be it Australian based or Asia based. The point being my current employer is "encouraging" me to retrain. As much as I'm flattered that they want to keep me around, it feels wrong that I should have to retrain to do so.
On an unrelated note, I found this little gem in the comments on vowe.net:
I agree with the confusions IBM was and is still creating. As strange as it sounds, but I have not yet found an IBM employee, who could explain which Workplace product(s) would be needed for a typical SMB customer who would want to fully replace Domino sometimes. For me, it looks as if the Workplace products today are more for the high end (1000+) customers.
It's so true. I was at the BP enablement (there's that word again -- is it really a word?) session for Workplace Collaborative Services Express a couple of weeks back, and one of the attendees pressed the presenters for more information on when each offering was suited to particular clients. It got very confusing very quickly. It was kind of amusing, and in the end the IBM stance was that "it makes sense once you've been working with it for a while". I actually agree with that statement, but I believe very strongly that things shouldn't have to be that way. Surely one of the things that is going to help generate sales for your product is if the Business Partners out there are finding selling the right product to the right customer something which is easy to do?
Anyway, the quote made me laugh.
Related links:
Carl Tyler's post
Volker's post
Software Soapbox
Ed Brill's take on it all