Qantas today confirmed that it would shortly migrate its corporate email platform from IBM’s Lotus Notes/Domino platform to Microsoft Exchange/Outlook.

Confirming a report this morning in the AustralianIT, Qantas executive manager of corporate services and technology David Hall said the process of migrating to Exchange had already begun, with piloting underway across the airline’s executive team.

“This is part of the Qantas technology group’s focus on leveraging technology to improve efficiencies for the business and enhancing communication effectiveness across our workforce,” said Hall.

“Subject to satisfactory piloting, we anticipate the migration to be substantially completed by the end of the year.” It is expected that around 20,000 staff will be migrated to the Microsoft platform.

Hall said Qantas would also be consolidating “a large number” of Lotus Notes applications and databases as part of its drive to “standardise, reduce and simplify” the number of business applications and tools it used.

Since moving up to his current role in October 2008 from his previous position as chief financial officer at Qantas subsidiary Jetstar, Hall has made dramatic changes to Qantas’ IT support operation.

In a landmark speech in August 2009, Hall said he believed Qantas could cut its IT costs by $100 million over the next financial year. Over the past couple of years the airline has pursued a number of IT outsourcing initiatives. For example, in mid-2009 some 200 Qantas staff were offered jobs at IBM as Big Blue took over responsibility for the airline’s project delivery servies.

Image credit: Qantas

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1. Jason Cartwright
   Posted 02/02/2010 at 3:59 pm | Permalink | Reply

   That’s a big win for Microsoft, most stories we hear of these days are about companies moving away from Microsoft software.

2. Renai LeMay
   Posted 02/02/2010 at 5:00 pm | Permalink | Reply

   I dunno Jason, other Microsoft software maybe, but I reckon Microsoft has a bajillion percent penetration of the corporate email market these days.

   They are still swapping out Lotus Notes and Novell Groupwise everywhere.

3. Gavin Bollard
   Posted 03/02/2010 at 3:14 pm | Permalink | Reply

   If you’re only using Notes for mail, then I can see the sense in swapping it out. Of course, I can’t see why you’d move to outlook when there’s some perfectly good cloud computing platforms out there, like Gmail. Google’s mail offering is better suited to an on-the-move international organisation.

   In any case, had they remained on Notes/Domino, they still could have consolidated their databases and cut costs by $100 million. It’s the business and procedural changes, rather than the system branding changes which are behind the cost recovery.