Judging from an unscientific survey of postings in the IBM developerWorks forums, and also in the Lotus/Domino related forums on LinkedIn, the adoption of IBM Notes and Domino seems to have increased dramatically in Asia during the last few years. The growth seems to be mainly in India, with China coming in at number two, while Notes jobs in the US seems to be dropping or being stagnant.
The indications that they are new or recent adopters are very strong. Many of the questions are very basic in their scope and it is obvious (and sometimes directly admitted) that a number of the posters are new to the Notes/Domino platform.
However, as many of the questions relates to older version of Notes/Domino (mostly 6.x and 7.x ), IBM should have a huge opportunity to Notes/Domino 9.0 on that market. It is slightly confusing why all these new adopters are on such old platform, but there might be some logic reason for that…
Also, there is a big interest on LinkedIn for certification, there are frequent requests for the answers to the certifications tests, mostly from people located in Asia. It also seems like IBM is pushing Notes harder in the Asian markets, as I even seen IBM employees in that region asking for the test answers.
Note: I am sure this has absolutely nothing to do with US/European companies outsourcing development to those countries…
I would say this is the wrong implication. I would say the growth is “employees” from contractors who are maintaining apps for paying customers….like Tata, et al. Outsourcing basically.
Yes, my note in the end should be read with a very sarcastic voice. 🙂
I think that any company that outsource their Notes development is doing a big mistake, as consulting companies like Tata et. al. just throw brand new developers at the projects, with no skills or experience.
I added a little graphic to the end of the post after you wrote your comment. 😉
Actually, I remember seeing the Notes splash screen in R6 or R7 that was full of faces that were either Asian (or could almost be mistaken for Asian), and at the time thinking “gee… what growing market is IBM heavily targeting here?”