I’ve heard since 2002 that IBM Notes and Domino was dead. And while the platform is certainly an endangered species these days, there’s still stuff happening on the Domino front that companies and organisations contemplating on leaving the platform really should pay attention to.

IBM has now launched a service that makes it possible for you to upload and run your IBM Notes applications in the cloud. This will become a very important addition to IBM Connections Cloud and SmartCloud Notes. It’s also something a lot of IBM customers and partners have requested for quite some time.

The service is called IBM Domino Application on Cloud (DAV) and all maintenance and servicing will be done by IBM. Ed Brill announced this in Tokyo during IBM Notes/Domino Day (isn’t that a wonderful name for a day?) on Tuesday September 19th. The service will be launched in October, so set your clocks!

DAC will be using CENTOS and Docker. The latter is something IBM has said they will be relying heavily on in the future. This will therefore be included in FP10 for IBM Domino 9.0.1, which will be released soon.

The data centers will be placed in the US, Europe and Pacific Asia (Japan). Australia, China and other locations will follow suit.

To use this service you must have your own IBM Notes/Domino license. The maximum size of any given .nsf file will be 25 GB.

The following functionality is promised:

• A Domino environment built around your organisations cert ID
• Users can deploy their own custom built .nsf applications
• The .nsf files will be available both via our IBM Notes client, ICAA and via web browsers
• The data will be encrypted
• Mail agents and scheduled agents will function as they do on your local server
• You can replicate between the cloud and your local servers
• All server upgrades, maintenance and backup will be done by IBM
• You can have a Domino cluster if you choose
• You can have DAOS if you wish
• Domino Access Service is optional
• You pay a monthly license pr .nsf file ($27) and you must signup for at least a year
• You can have more than Domino server if needed
• Monthly reports about all your Domino applications
• A tool that analyse your applications so that you can decide what applications to scratch, which you want to keep locally and which you will move to the cloud

Thus far IBM has only offered a cloud solution for email and calendar, via IBM Verse, så a lot of people began cheering when these news were unveiled.

Here’s IBM’s video presentation of the new offering: