AMP cloud move sees Lotus ditched
Financial services giant AMP this afternoon revealed that it would ditch its Lotus Notes/Domino installation and shift to Microsoft's Outlook/Exchange platform as part of its move to cloud services hosted by CSC Australia.
AMP revealed that its move to hosted email wasn't a simple Exchange to hosted Exchange migration. "AMP currently uses Lotus Notes managed by CSC," AMP IT director of service management Sharmini Sivathas said.
The revelation adds AMP's name to a long and growing list of large Australian organisations, which have over the past several years revealed decisions to dump IBM-owned Notes for Microsoft's platform (and sometimes Google's Gmail).
In February, Qantas confirmed it would migrate off Notes. The month after Monash University phased out Notes and switched to Gmail. And in June the newly formed Department of Human Services confirmed plans to end its long-running relationship with the IBM platform. There are, however, some IBM customers in Australia who continue to be happy with Notes, such as Australian youth charity BoysTown, which recently decided against Exchange or Gmail and instead upgraded its Notes installation.
Sivathas said the cloud email migration came about because AMP had been undertaking a review of its email, productivity and IT collaboration tools.
"Recent changes in the enterprise mail market have created opportunities both in terms of cost and functionality which aligns to AMP's collaboration strategy," she said. "AMP has evaluated and piloted a number of cloud and on-premise email offerings, and found that CSC's Microsoft offering best suits AMP's needs."
The executive said that AMP saw productivity benefits in being able to provide its staff with an email system that was "more tightly integrated with other desktop productivity tools". In addition, financial benefits were a "key consideration". The financial services giant has more than 3500 employees and also works with more than 2000 financial planners in Australia and New Zealand.
CSC was picked for the roll-out, Sivathas said, because it had been AMP's infrastructure partner for over 10 years, and was familiar with AMP's environment and the financial services giant's specific needs.