I don’t think this question can easily be answered.
Customers switch platforms for individual reasons - often it’s pretty dumb in my opinion. They want to use outlook for email so they start a migration to that, don’t realize that notes based applications can’t be easily reproduced and now all they’ve done is double their costs by maintaining email and domino licenses for apps, or they drop domino maintenance to save costs and turn off app development in the company. So they’ve effectively traded apps and application support that can help run business needs for “better email”. Pretty fricken dumb if you ask me.
Certainly we’re hearing more and more of people moving away from Notes and Domino. Some of this trend likes squarely on IBM’s shoulders for once again going into a big period of “vagueness” for the platform and seemingly ignoring it. When all IBM talks about is Bluemix, which has value, and Verse, which seems pretty stupid to me, then the competitors jump again on the “Notes is Dead” bandwagon.
In my own organization, one of the smartest guys I know recently took a look at MANY other development platforms, and came back and said “We don’t know how lucky we are to have XPages”. It’s not perfect, but It provides so much capability and takes away a lot of pain in setting up and working with other dev platforms. So while we ourselves might be giving up domino email for Exchange and Outlook, currently we’re committed to XPages because we think it’s an excellent platform to build applications on.
As for mail? Who cares? I don’t. It’s kinda dumb to not use Domino email if you have the servers anyway, but any future that Domino has is application based and not email based.
One of the biggest problems out there is there’s no good comparison to XPages development vs other platforms. Pros and Cons. Domino/XPages is NOT perfect, but you get so much out of the box. Database security, Document security, Scheduled Agents, easy replication and deployment, etc… Some of those things you need to build yourself in other platforms. But there’s no page, document, or slide deck from IBM touting Domino as an App Dev platform. Why? Beats the piss out of me. But always keep in mind that IBM’s version of a “Small Business” or probably a company with a MINIMUM of 25,000 users. Anything under that they really don’t care about. Note: That is my personal opinion and I’ve no real information to back that up. But Verse sure is not intended for a company of 200 employees! That’s for sure.
I can tell you from my little corner of the world I still get emails from people brand new to XPages and just getting started. So that’s a good thing to see.
the question you should be asking these customers is - where are they going to build their apps? Do they really know what they’re getting with that? Probably not.