IBM’s Lotus Notes is a major product in the enterprise email space. According to IBM’s Press Release from January this year, Lotus Notes is used by “more than 50 percent of America’s largest 100 companies” (Note that it doesn’t say Fortune 100). I personally doubt that number, but Notes is definitely a big player. That is why today’s announcement of LotusLive iNotes is significant.
LotusLive iNotes is IBM’s answer to Google Apps and Microsoft Exchange Online.
The service is priced at $3.75 per month and per account ($3.00 per month for an annual plan). With just 1 GB of storage per mailbox iNotes does not immediately impress. All the standard features are included (POP3, IMAP, SMTP and obviously webmail) and additional storage is available.
As a stand-alone service, iNotes might not be very noteworthy. Yet, if you combine it with the rest of the LotusLive product-line, you have an impressive product suite that makes Google Apps look like something a kindergartener put together. Assuming iNotes talks with the rest of products, LotusLive is a very complete product line with features like online meeting tools, instant messaging, desktop sharing, file sharing, contact management and other nice features.
We’ve reached out to the LotusLive team and requested a demo account, but as I’m writing this, we have not heard back from them. We did however take the rest of the LotusLive products for a spin, and the UI is really solid.
The large number of existing enterprises running on-site Lotus Notes installation makes LotusLive iNotes a big deal. For companies currently using Notes, switching to LotusLive makes a whole lot of sense. Given that the migration from an on-site deployment to LiveNote is simple, we can expect to see LiveNotes to take off soon. iNotes was simply the last and final addition to the product line required for companies to start to seriously considering phasing out their existing infrastructure.
LotusLive iNotes might not seem as impressive as Google Apps Premier with 25GB storage, but LotusLive is about so much more than just inflated storage numbers. And think about it: in a company with 10,000 employees only a fraction of the employees will use more than 1GB of storage (depending on industry). While people are trolling about iNotes’ low storage quota, the enterprise CIOs are calculating how much they could save.
(As a side note, Chris Kanaracus over at Computer World points out that iNotes is based on technology from Outblaze, a company IBM bought a while back.)
[...] few days ago we covered IBM’s announcement of iNotes – an email addition to [...]