Why Evolving Your Proven Apps Is Smarter Than Starting Over
Executive Summary:
If you’re evaluating what to do with your HCL Domino investment, here’s the bottom line:
- Faster time to value: Modernize user experience, adopt AI, and integrate with modern systems without rewriting your core applications.
- Lower risk, higher control: Keep your data, workflows, and compliance models intact while extending capabilities securely.
- Predictable and affordable: Avoid the migration tax, dual licensing, and multi-year rebuild costs by evolving what already works.
In the rush to continually digitally transform, IT leaders need to be selective about their investment strategy. Specifically, they employ a blended sustain, replace, and invest approach to maximize their resources, attention, and budgets.
Hence, it’s a straightforward business decision to either maintain and extend what you have or move to a newer solution on a case-by-case basis. When there isn’t a compelling business case to replace a solution because the existing TCO outweighs the costs and investment required, extending what you already have is faster, less risky, and less costly.
Backed by seven years of ongoing innovation, HCL Domino is enabling businesses to realize more value from what they have without the massive cost, risk, or disruption of replatforming.
Whether you are maximizing an existing HCL Domino investment or assessing its role in your architecture, the following sections outline what’s possible today and address common misconceptions about the platform.
Get Started with The Assessment
Understanding your current Domino environment is a crucial first step. We have integrated powerful assessment tools directly into the platform to evaluate your deployment, applications, and data across multiple systems. We regularly consolidate and optimize both on-prem and private-cloud deployments to save you money. Equally, we can identify which data is essential for production systems, archiving, or removal, in accordance with your compliance policies.
Panagenda's iDNA Applications provide the design and data analytics needed to modernize Domino apps on time and within budget.
HCL Advisor: HCLSoftware’s proprietary tool for scanning customer Domino environments. It identifies migration risks, application usage, and optimization opportunities.
Adopt Sovereign AI: Your Data, Your Rules
Across the IT industry, a key driver of many migration discussions today is the desire to adopt AI to tap into hidden knowledge more easily or to automate for greater productivity, which consistently emerge as top use cases.
In reality, using external AI solutions puts an organisation's data privacy at risk. If you want to harness AI within an existing Domino-based solution or query your data while respecting your organisation's policies, HCL Domino IQ can do that today. Not only is the data queryable via local LLMs, but the integrity of the data’s security is maintained so as not to inadvertently reveal PII information.
HCL Domino IQ is available for all HCL licensed customers to solve this challenge, bringing enterprise-grade AI directly to your data:
- Private intelligence: Run Large Language Models (LLMs) completely offline and within your secure perimeter.
- Agentic value: Built-in Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) allows you to query your own databases to summarize documents and extract insights without your sensitive information ever leaving your control.
- Reinventing workflows: The goal isn't to create a "lookalike" app on a new platform; it’s to reimagine how your current apps can use Agentic AI and advanced analytics to derive material competitive advantage.
- Total data control: The data remains within your control, either on-prem or in a private cloud, and is not subject to external influence or access.
HCL Nomad delivers a modernized, web-friendly experience for managing and browsing corporate HR policies and procedures.
Strengthen Interoperability While Optimizing TCO
In a fast-paced world, every enterprise has interdependency across its systems, processes and data to ensure business gets done. HCL Domino has always embraced evolving standards over the last two decades and today provides standardised REST APIs with OData and, shortly, MCP support. With security at its core, integrating your Domino applications with other enterprise tools to ensure your foundational apps remain a vital part of your digital ecosystem is easy and low-risk.
Based on studies conducted by Forrester Research, HCL Domino is an extremely cost-effective application platform. From an admin perspective, HCL Domino is cloud native and container-ready, meaning you can deploy it wherever it best suits your strategy. Whether you choose on-prem infrastructure, a private cloud, or a hybrid Kubernetes environment, the choice remains yours. This flexibility ensures you meet strict data residency requirements and avoid deployment lock-in.
Customer Schema Management Dashboard for configuring database fields and access modes.
Modernize Usability of Existing Applications
With HCL Domino, you do not need to rewrite your code to deliver a modern user experience or release yourself from support of the Notes desktop client.
Using Material Design, our App UI Modernisation Toolkit, and HCL Nomad, you can transform the look and feel of your existing applications and instantly extend them to web browsers and mobile devices with minimal effort. This allows you to retain the unique business logic that gives you a competitive edge while providing the sleek, accessible interfaces your workforce expects.
HR Policy Hub Dashboard: Centralized portal for managing employee procedures, compliance updates, and corporate resources.
Close the Talent Gap with Modern Development Leaders often worry about maintaining applications that require niche or dwindling expertise. While we have been actively investing in our worldwide community for years to cultivate the next generation of skills, we have also aligned with industry standards to expand the scope of development. For example:
- With HCL Domino Leap, line-of-business experts can create secure, audit-ready workflow applications using drag-and-drop tools, removing the development bottleneck for IT by leveraging their data.
- We have moved beyond proprietary languages. Domino supports Java 21, JavaScript, Node.js, and REST APIs, and allows you to tap into the global pool of full-stack developers to extend your applications or build new ones.
- Domino IQ removes the need to rehost your data to make it LLM-ready. You have your choice of LLM, and standard GPUs are supported.
- We are investing in Vibe Coding so organizations can rapidly prototype new React-based applications that can work with their existing applications and data.
If you are interested in learning how to leverage HCL Domino with your AI Agents strategy, we can help with our Agentic platform, OOTB integrations, and know-how.
HR Policy Hub portal showcasing centralized employee resources, real-time compliance tracking, and corporate procedure management
Restart to Lead with HCL Domino
The future is bright. There’s no limit to what you can do with your Domino investment and there’s more to explore outside of this short blog.
Active HCL Domino users and returning HCL Domino Restart users connect with your HCL representative or HCL Business Partner to review the latest platform capabilities and identify the best path forward.
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