What's the marksetshare of GroupWise, and is it viable?
We were recently asked this question by a GroupWise Admin, and wanted to share our response:

The numbers range all over the place, so you really have to take all of this with a large grain of salt.

Exchange claims to have the largest market share. However, they are counting the number of Outlook clients in use, which is huge since many home users use Outlook to connect to their ISP's via POP3. They don't count the number of Outlook clients using Exchange as a back-end. Interesting way to bend the numbers.

Lotus claims that Notes is next in size, but they forget to mention that they count all the users of Notes that aren't using email. This means that every Notes client that uses GroupWise, Outlook or even Eudora on their desktop gets counted as a Notes client. While this is true, it means you really can't put Notes in the same class as GroupWise or Exchange. Notes is a database, not an email package.

Novell, however, counts real, sold seats of GroupWise. And at this point, even Microsoft concedes GroupWise is at about 28 million users (as of 2001), and growing.

So, the percentage of GroupWise's market share, depends on who you ask. One thing is for sure, there are more small companies using Exchange and more large companies using GroupWise. Why? GroupWise is a solid platform, free of viruses, that scales very well. Small companies can compromise and settle for less. Large companies depend on their IT infrastructure. Compromise is not an option.

As for GroupWise's ongoing viability, it will be around for some years to come. 28 millions users can't just switch overnight, even if they wanted to. Will it last for 10 years or 20 years? I doubt it. Nothing in this industry lasts very long. But then again, it used to be that no one got fired for buying IBM...

Dave Strickler
dstrickler@emailsolutions.com
(617) 267-0044 x810