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IBM takes on Google with LotusLive iNotes
Wednesday, November 4, 2009 by Angela Ashenden
Last month, IBM announced the long-awaited announcement of the availability of LotusLive iNotes, its cloud-based email alternative to Lotus Notes and Domino. The technology comes from IBM’s acquisition of the messaging assets of Hong Kong-based vendor, Outblaze, which was completed back in April, and provides a simple, web-based client for email, calendaring and contact management. While Outblaze will not be a familiar name to many in the West, the company has had a decade’s experience of providing webmail services, and the acquisition provided IBM with a mature, stable product which can be delivered via a SaaS-based model by IBM, as well as by IBM partners as a white label solution.
If the name of the new product sounds a little familiar to you, that’s because the iNotes brand itself is not new – it first appeared several years ago, where it referred to the web-based client for Lotus Notes (“Lotus iNotes”). The name was dropped in 2003 when the client was rebranded as Domino Web Access, but was reinstated earlier in 2009. This latest use of the iNotes brand for the LotusLive service is understandable – IBM is clearly keen to leverage the strength of the Notes brand, as well as highlighting that this new offering is in addition to the Notes/Domino platform rather than suggesting a move away from it. However, this dual use of the brand does introduce confusion, particularly at a time when IBM is working hard to emphasise the strength the broader Lotus portfolio, beyond the flagship Notes/Domino product.
While the new product falls under the LotusLive brand, at present there is little integration between LotusLive iNotes and the other LotusLive products, although this is a major priority for the company, and is expected to be delivered in H1 2010. Though it is clearly positioning itself against the likes of Google with its low-cost subscription-based licensing (LotusLive iNotes is available at $36 per user per year, compared to $50 for Google Apps), with this initial release IBM is not explicitly targeting the SMB market, and is instead focusing on enabling email provisioning for the “unserved and underserved” within larger organisations (and often existing Notes customers) – for example those employees who are not “knowledge workers” and who may have limited or no access to email. The key for IBM – both in terms of the overall LotusLive services portfolio, and the relationship between the on-premise Notes/Domino environment and the cloud-based LotusLive iNotes service – is the hybrid approach, allowing organisations to combine on-premise and cloud-based services as required, for example using a mixture of Lotus Notes licences and LotusLive iNotes within a single domain, or enabling the use of cloud-based web conferencing solutions, but storing the meeting recordings on-premise. At present it is early days for this strategy and there is a lot of work still to be done, but at a conceptual level at least, I believe IBM is on the right track here, given the continued concern and mistrust within organisations over cloud security, as well as the need for integration with on-premise systems.
A major issue that still needs work is the subject of migration – at present this is a custom professional services offering, although there are (unspecified) plans to deliver self-migration in future. While the custom services approach is reasonable for the enterprise customer – who may either have vast volumes of archived email for migration and therefore will be looking for a custom offering in any case, or who may only be looking to deliver LotusLive iNotes to employees with no existing email accounts, for example – if IBM wants to target the SMB market with this service, it will need to have the self-migration option ready.
In conclusion, I think this is a great addition to the Lotus and LotusLive portfolios, but there is definitely still a lot of work to be done, both from an engineering and marketing perspective. What is promising is that IBM seems to have a clear view of where it is going with this strategy, combined with some interesting, innovative and practical ideas for how to get there. It’s good to see the original Lotus spirit still holding strong!
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Posted in Collaboration