As a result, the TCO elements that remain, such as administration and management time requirements, will achieve a higher profile and will be more carefully scrutinized. Second-tier messaging vendors will be squeezed out of many large organizations. As a result, the market may develop with only Lotus and Microsoft being viable competitors at the enterprise level, Novell and Netscape being more prominent in mid-sized organizations, and a variety of smaller vendors simply disappearing from the market. This increase in related downtime creates a ripple effect throughout the enterprise in the form of lost productivity. This fact has not been lost on messaging vendors, many of whom have developed a variety of tools to assist in the migration process, including tools to help convert message stores.
Migration can be an arduous task for many organizations.
However, about 20 percent of organizations had little or no impact on other parts of the organization due to their migration effort. It takes a mean of 7.0 weeks for the typical administrator to become comfortable and proficient with managing the new system. Part of the downtime increase may simply be due to the fact that administrators are not as comfortable with the new system as they were with the old. Typical end-users are nearly 18 percent more productive using new systems in comparison to previous ones, although the increase in productivity varies between systems implemented and the environments from which users have migrated. Across all systems, most of the needed first-year functionality is provided in the system itself, while the remaining needed functionality needs to be developed on a custom basis.