Over a four-month period, 40,000 Microsoft Outlook and Exchange software users were moved to the IBM platform. Continental also decided to deploy IBM Lotus Quickr and Sametime software as their collaboration and unified communications platform. The reasons for choosing IBM over Microsoft included lower licensing and operating costs as well as greater platform independence.
Continental's acquisition of Siemens VDO brought with it a big question. In addition to its 37,000 IBM Lotus Domino and Notes software users, the company now had 40,000 new Microsoft Exchange and Outlook users from the company it acquired. The evaluation considered several migration scenarios: immediately switching the entire group to the Lotus platform; gradually switching to the Exchange platform; or migrating to third party open source products or hosted services.
