IBM sells Lotus Notes / Domino business to HCL for $ 1.8B – TechCrunch
IBM announced last night that it sells the final components from the 1995 acquisition of Lotus to Indian company HCL for 1.8 billion dollars.
IBM paid $ 3.5 billion for Lotus back today. The big pieces here are Lotus Notes, Domino and Portal. These were a major part of IBM's business business for a long time, but last year Big Blue began to retire and sold the development to HCL, while maintaining sales and marketing control.
This announcement marks the end of the line for IBM involvement. With the development of the platform out of control, and the need for money after spending $ 34 billion for Red Hat, IBM might just decide that it was no longer sensible to hold any part of this internally.
In the case of HCL, it sees an opportunity to continue building the Notes / Domino business and it is taking place with this purchase. "The major deployments of these products provide us with a great opportunity to reach and serve thousands of global businesses across a variety of industries and markets," said C Vijayakumar, President and CEO of HCL Technologies, in a statement to agree on the deal .
Alan Lepofsky, an analyst at Constellation Research, who closely monitors business cooperation, said the sale could be a new start for software that IBM has not been aware of for a long time. "HCL is far more interested in Notes / Domino than IBM has been for decades. They invest heavily and try to rejuvenate the brand," said Lepofsky to TechCrunch.
Although this software may feel long in the tooth, Notes and Domino are still I use in many corners of the business, and this is especially true in EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) and AP (Asia Pacific), "said Lepofsky.
He added that IBM appears to be the very exciting cooperation area with this sale "It seems that IBM has been working out of the game," he said.
This move makes sense for IBM, moving in a different direction as it develops its cloud industry. The Red Hat acquisition in October shows in particular that the company wants to embrace private and hybrid cloud distributions and older software like Lotus Notes and Domino does not play a role in that world.
The agreement, subject to approval processes, is expected to close in the middle of next year. [1[ads1]9659010]
