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HCL is pleased to have completed the acquisition of IBM’s Collaboration offerings, fulfilling a key step in building a robust Digital Solutions portfolio.  We are excited about the future. Our goal is to provide our customers with a better-connected business by providing integration, personalization, and openness. By doing so, we will better connect the elements of your business, and help you harness the power of your business outcomes, data and people for a richer Digital Enterprise. You can read the press release here.

In the weeks ahead, HCL will share our vision for the Digital Solutions portfolio, and the four product pillars – Domino, Connections, Digital Experience and Sametime. Achieving that vision requires continued technology decisions and adjustments to align the portfolio strategy. 
 
At HCL, we know cloud, and on-premises, are both important delivery options for our customers today, and they each remain pillars of our foundation for the future.   While the IBM approach to delivering the Collaboration portfolio via IBM SoftLayer has many great elements, the HCL vision calls for a roadmap that delivers increased flexibility, ability to integrate across multiple cloud services, and an ongoing product velocity and innovation.  
 
By taking a modern approach, HCL can deliver results and business outcomes that are critical to your organization – that can scale to meet our customers’ demands as your businesses evolve. Consequently, we’d like to expand upon the way our customers can enjoy our Digital Solutions by providing our customers with your choice of the cloud:

• HCL Cloud – An agnostic SaaS platform that can leverage best in class Platform as a Service (PaaS) offerings while creating an open, flexible service that integrates with industry-leading technologies. 
• Private Cloud – Continuing with our commitment to on-premises, HCL will optimize its deployment strategy to reduce customers’ total cost of ownership and better enable adoption of our latest and greatest software releases via continuous delivery. Specifically, for Connections, Sametime, and Domino deployed for both mail and applications.  
• Partner-led Cloud – Our business partners are masters of deployment, support, and enablement of the Connections Collaboration portfolio.  By enabling them to deploy, provision, and support their own cloud local to you, our customers will have new opportunities to leverage a cloud deployment while keeping their data close and seeking geo and industry-specific certifications that matter to their businesses, specifically, for Connections, Sametime and Domino.  

This has implications for our existing cloud customers. As is documented at the End of Marketing/End of Service announcement on HCL.com, effective immediately, HCL will no longer sell new subscriptions to Connections Cloud and Domino Apps on Cloud (DAC) services. Accordingly, the services will end on July 16, 2020.  
 
Naturally, existing customers may purchase additional seats as needed to remain compliant with their license agreements for the remainder of the period of service.

• The Connections Cloud offerings include SmartCloud Notes & Verse, Connections, Engagement Center, Docs, and Sametime.
• HCL will continue to maintain the current Connections Cloud environment to the standards to which you have contracted until that end of service date.  There will be no further enhancements made during this period, with the exception of critical fixes and security updates.

 For the Domino portfolio, specifically:
 
Based on our analysis of the market, mail will continue to be a core capability of the Domino platform for the foreseeable future. However, to drive greater innovation and velocity across all deployment options, HCL has no plans to provide a like for like replacement for Smart Cloud Notes or Verse on Cloud. Instead, clients will be invited to transition to their own private cloud, or partner-led cloud solution using the latest release of Domino and Verse on-premises. 
 
In summary:
HCL is excited about the future of the Digital Solutions portfolio for both on-premises and cloud. In the coming weeks and months, you will learn more about our vision and strategy, which will position us to greater product velocity and innovation.
 
We are bringing you this message today because we want to be transparent and open with our customers, HCL Masters and business partners.  We plan to provide you with advice on appropriate migration strategies to the new HCLapproach we’ve just discussed or back to an on-premises deployment.
 
HCL has a wealth of experience in outsourcing, partnering and services led solutions where we work with our clients to ensure least disruptive outcomes as they wish to transition from their use of an IBM Cloud offering to our modern HCL stack.  We are confident that this investment in our future will magnify the success of our customers.
 
At HCL, we value your business, and we know you will have questions. We want to hear from you, so please reach out to us or contact your HCL sales representative with your questions. 

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