Daniel Nashed's Blog

1Mark Holloway  24.04.2026 8:57:37  Engage 2026 Presentation Slides Leveraging CertMgr and Resources

Let's be honest here. Engage is still a great community event — the people, the sessions, the social evenings — but at some point we have to stop avoiding the elephant in the room.

Attendance is shrinking year after year. Zero major surprises from HCL. A keynote full of AI buzzwords that feel exciting on stage but leave SMBs wondering: "where exactly do I fit in this roadmap?"

Agentic AI and Vibe Coding are cool. But 80% of the Domino installed base is mid-market companies running business-critical apps on lean IT budgets. When was the last time HCL announced something that made *that* audience feel genuinely valued?

The community keeps showing up — loyal, passionate, willing to evangelize. HCL keeps talking strategy. But strategy without traction is just a PowerPoint.

How many more years of declining attendance before someone at HCL asks the hard question: are we growing this ecosystem, or just managing its decline?

2Richard Pajerski  24.04.2026 13:22:08  CertMgr and .kyr files

Thanks for the presentation on the CertMgr! IBM had definitely neglected this area of the product and it's great to see that HCL took the time to roll this out and help stabilize Domino's security posture.

One point -- for folks still needing to deal with those legacy .kyr files for whatever reason, I offer an easy-to-use and very inexpensive Windows Desktop utility (Aperture) for managing them.

Best,

Richard

3Daniel Nashed  24.04.2026 14:45:24  CertMgr and .kyr files

@Richard, there should not be any reason to use kyr files in 2026.

Starting with Domino 12 CertMgr is the recommended way to use TLS/SSL certificates.

Already in 12.0 you see a message that you should switch to CertMgr.

I would be personally interested in what reasons a customer should have to use kyr files.

Thanks

Daniel

4Daniel Nashed  24.04.2026 14:50:42  Engage 2026 Presentation Slides Leveraging CertMgr and Resources

@Mark,

Why are you posting a reply like this on my post for a technical session for Engage instead of sharing it with HCL?

Let me forward your reply to HCL to have them aware of your feedback.

Daniel

5Kris De Bisschop  27.04.2026 8:28:15  Engage 2026 Presentation Slides Leveraging CertMgr and Resources

Hi Mark

thanks a lot for your comments but I think it's difficult to give an opinion on an event if you were not present.

This year we had more attendees and there were even students present. Those students are the people that need to get introduced in the products to know more about them and see for themselves that, with the knowledge they have, they can work with the products that last already more then 30 years.

It's true that some of the stuff shown during the opening session is not a fit for all sorts of companies amongst us but allowing to use AI, at no additional license cost, and being able to create decent solutions out of it, is something that has been shown during lots of other sessions during the two days of Engage.

This community is year on year growing, every year we see new people coming to Engage and we have new people getting introduced to the HCL Digital Solutions portfolio.

I never saw so much new stuff getting introduced in the products then since HCL took over. They listen to what is needed, they evaluate how it can be delivered and they deliver, year after year and this for the last 7 years since they took over from IBM.

I suggest you attend next year's Engage and follow the sessions given by people in the field, working with the products and sharing their knowledge how they leverage what HCL offers.

6Mark Holloway  27.04.2026 13:04:28  Engage 2026 Presentation Slides Leveraging CertMgr and Resources

Hi @Daniel & @Kris,

thanks for sharing your perspective — and yes, I was there, in previous years. This year I wasn't, and that itself tells you something: nobody is paying for my attendance anymore. Not because Engage isn't a great community event — it is — but because for most of my clients, HCL is simply no longer on the radar. That's not a personal opinion. That's the market talking.

**On the products**

After 7 years under HCL, we still don't have a Notes client that can compete visually or functionally with modern productivity tools. The UI remains stuck in a design language that feels like 2005. HCL Verse was supposed to be the future of mail — it was never finished, never reached feature parity, and was quietly sidelined. These are not minor gaps. They are fundamental promises that were never delivered.

Nomad Web is a step in the right direction, but it's still not a full replacement for the desktop client, and the roadmap credibility has been eroded by years of under-delivery.

**On the financials**

Let's look at the numbers. HCLSoftware's Annual Recurring Revenue for FY25 came in at just over $1 billion — essentially flat compared to the previous year, with growth of 1.8% in constant currency. The software division grew 3.5% for the full year — modest, at best, for a company claiming to be transforming the enterprise software market. Compare that to what Microsoft, Salesforce, or ServiceNow are doing in the same space.

More telling: HCLSoftware's revenue is around $1.4 billion out of HCLTech's total $14+ billion. Notes/Domino is a fraction of that. The strategic weight of this product line within the parent company is marginal — and investment decisions reflect that.

**My personal take — why HCL will not grow in this market**

HCL bought the IBM legacy portfolio in 2019 for one reason: to extract value from an installed base, not to build a new one. That's a legitimate business strategy, but it's not a growth strategy. You don't invest heavily in acquiring new customers for a platform that the broader market has already written off as legacy.

The European enterprise market has largely made its decisions. Microsoft 365 is the default. Google Workspace is the alternative. Everything else needs to fight for relevance — and to fight, you need aggressive sales, a modern go-to-market, and products that genuinely impress prospects. HCL has none of those three things in this segment.

The fact that Engage — a European flagship event for an enterprise software portfolio — is entirely run by a volunteer community is not something to celebrate. It's a symptom. It means HCL doesn't believe enough in this market to invest directly in it. The community does extraordinary work, but it is filling a gap that HCL itself should be filling. When a vendor outsources its own evangelism to unpaid volunteers, it has already decided the market isn't worth the investment.

I genuinely respect the people in this ecosystem — the consultants, the developers, the community members who keep showing up year after year. But respect for the community is not the same as confidence in the vendor.

Hope isn't a strategy. And for most of us working in the field, the business reality is already pointing in a different direction.

See you — maybe — at next year's Engage.

7Daniel Nashed  29.04.2026 17:52:57  Engage 2026 Presentation Slides Leveraging CertMgr and Resources

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