LotusLive iNotes launch, with great coverage

October 2 2009

On Monday, IBM will formally announce LotusLive iNotes: business-quality, cloud-based, low-cost email.  At a list price of US$36/user/year, LotusLive iNotes delivers the right tools to provide email to a broad range of users, along with sibling roots and integration with Lotus Notes/Domino and LotusLive Notes.  There was a lot of coverage today about the launch, and the press clearly understood who stood to lose from IBM's new offering, starting with Reuters:

IBM is introducing an inexpensive Web-based corporate email service that will compete with Google Inc's Google Apps, which has recently suffered several high-profile outages.  International Business Machines Corp will likely try to capitalize on the damage that those outages have caused to Google Apps over the past year. Last month millions of business users could not access email for almost two hours.

An IBM spokesman said on Thursday that the company will start selling its LotusLive iNotes next week. The lightweight email service will cost $36 per user per year, about 25 percent less than what Google charges for a more robust product.

IBM's offering does not have as many bells and whistles as Google's, but the technology giant could attract more customers because it has decades more experience serving the business market. Its products include Lotus Notes, one of the world's two most widely used email programs.

Google, on the other hand, generates the bulk of its revenue from advertisements placed on free search products targeted at consumers. It is just getting into the business of selling to businesses.

"The IBM brand will help a lot," said Forrester Research Inc analyst Liz Herbert.

Or, as Gartner analyst Matt Cain put it, "This is trouble for Google."

IBM now offers the most complete set of email services -- on-premises, hosted, or cloud.  And the launch of LotusLive iNotes represents a next phase, not a destination.  We will continue to evolve the LotusLive Notes offering for Domino-based cloud services, while of course continuing to deliver the best-in-class on-premises tools in Lotus Notes and Domino 8.5.1...very soon.

Link: LotusLive.com E-mail Solutions >

Ed Brill | Highland Park, IL USA Category:  LotusLive  Add/View Comments [23]

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  1. 1  Eric Mack http://www.EricMackOnline.com | 10/2/2009 9:52:07 PM

    I look forward to the day when LotusLive iNotes will allow the customer to select a custom mail template. Then, they can get GTD Enabled hosted mail from IBM with eProductivity. That would give IBM something Google and Redmond can't touch yet.

  1. 2  Alan Bell http://www.theopenlearningcentre.com | 10/3/2009 3:47:30 AM

    Hi Ed,

    nice new blog theme, very clean and tidy. I just saw the coverage on Slashdot, not 100% favourable it has to be said. There is a lot of confusion about the Notes branding of this offering. As far as I can tell it is a MySQL/Linux based server running this and the application itself is something bought from OutBlaze that has been re-themed to look a bit like Quickr et al. Nothing to do with Domino, nothing to do with iNotes, nothing to do with either of the two Quickr branded products which have nothing to do with each other. It is amazing the number of unrelated back ends that are about now, being sold together as an integrated suite based on a common look (not even a common CSS structure, they each have to be re-themed independently as far as I know). The back end is being hidden more and more, and customers are told not to look behind the curtain, just concentrate on the feature list. Maybe it is just me getting older but I find myself agreeing more and more with Richard Stallman these days about the importance of Software freedom and the threat to it from Cloud computing.

  1. 3  Darren http://www.dadams.co.uk | 10/3/2009 4:25:37 AM

    @2 - if the solution delivers the functionality, security and robustness, should the subscribing business be that concerned about the back-end? I thought the point of Software as a Service was that the headache and cost of running the solution was removed from the customer.

    The OutBlaze soluion already has an installed base of around 40 million seats - with that volume it wouldn't be wise for IBM to disrupt the existing infrastructure.

    The other key thing is that with LotusLive iNotes is now in a unique position of being able to offer a company a full range of delivery models, from SaaS at one end of the scale to on-premise at the other.

  1. 4  Alan Bell http://www.theopenlearningcentre.com | 10/3/2009 4:55:21 AM

    @3 I don't really disagree with you. The point of SaaS is indeed to remove the headache. I like the headache. I like to have the freedom to understand what it is I am using. It is a win for Marketing over Technology. Don't look behind the curtain, just trust the brand and everything will be fine, just keep on paying.

    Lotus is in the unique position of having a range of totally different products all with similar names, each having a delivery model and scale characteristics that cover a wide range. I don't think it is possible to obtain the code that runs the LotusLive iNotes and run that code on local hardware (although I could be wrong - show me if I am).

  1. 5  Nathan T. Freeman http://nathan.lotus911.com | 10/3/2009 8:12:53 AM

    Good for you for saying "on-premises" instead of "on-premise." :)

  1. 6  Darren http://www.dadams.co.uk | 10/3/2009 9:47:48 AM

    Nathan, I stand corrected...

    { Link }

  1. 7  Silvia Garcia http://www.itranser.com | 10/3/2009 4:19:33 PM

    Only issue I do not like.... Price for business with more than 1,000 acounnts ? Come on, IBM, goes for a broader market!!!

    Our firm has 40 employees.... so this not seems to be for us..(would love it). Please note that Google Mail alows you to use your own domain, small staff companies, some minor personalizations (logos, etc), pda&movil sync... you can do it too much better.. go for it....

    One thing I also like about the Google Mail service is that you can re-sell it to your own customers, having your margin / comission of the service offered.... Why do not you adapt also a similar model for IBM business partners so we can not only use it, but also resell it ?

  1. 8  Ed Brill http://www.edbrill.com | 10/3/2009 4:54:05 PM

    @7 you can re-sell it. It's on Passport Advantage. There are some other channel aspects to LotusLive overall and that opportunity is still being developed further.

  1. 9  Henning Heinz  | 10/3/2009 7:11:35 PM

    The UI looks very nice. Maybe this could become the XPage version of the next mail template update?

    But if you really want to compete with Google you have to sell this for much less than 1000 seats.

    What is IBM's answer for competitors maybe now saying that cost effective mail and calendaring only works without Lotus Domino?

  1. 10  Ed Brill http://www.edbrill.com | 10/3/2009 9:12:04 PM

    The answer to that is LotusLive Notes, especially our V2 version planned for 2010. We will bring down the operational cost of LotusLive Notes through a multi-tenant Domino architecture and other improvements. Both LotusLive Notes and LotusLive iNotes are already and will be even more competitive, along with the Notes/Domino on-premises offerings. Watch for more on this in the next few months.

  1. 11  Henning Heinz  | 10/4/2009 3:56:17 AM

    Perfect. Thank you.

  1. 12  Volker Weber http://vowe.net | 10/4/2009 6:55:53 AM

    Eric, LotusLive iNotes is not based on Notes or Domino. It won't run your template.

  1. 13  Ed Brill http://www.edbrill.com | 10/4/2009 7:32:25 AM

    @13 but LotusLive Notes is based on Notes and Domino, so there is the opportunity for a cloud-based service that does. Template modification is one of the most challenging aspects of putting together an online version of Domino at a fixed price.

  1. 14  Volker Weber http://vowe.net | 10/4/2009 8:24:50 AM

    That's the one where you have to buy a thousand (or is it fivehundred now) seats, right?

  1. 15  Ed Brill http://www.edbrill.com | 10/4/2009 8:46:51 AM

    For now, there is a minimum quantity at 1000.

  1. 16  Eric Mack http://www.EricMackOnline.com | 10/4/2009 1:57:45 PM

    Perhaps it's now time for us to take our proven eProductivity API to the web so we can make it available in various Cloud-based opportunities. David and I have had this discussion before and I usually made it a low priority. I wonder if a Cloud host would see the value for their customers...

  1. 17  Silvia Garcia http://www.itranser.com | 10/4/2009 5:39:29 PM

    IBM has the potential to be the bigger player on this market... I do not care if they go slow, if they do things well...

    I understand that service should be launched first for big accounts (more than 1,000 users), and I feel better now that I known that on the roadmap there is a plan to also give the service to small business and accounts.

    I can not wait to see the next feautures promised at @10.

    If IBM does it well, makes it also internationally avaiable (I meant, localized languages releases), avaiability for partners to re-sell it and take beneficit of it (as @8 states), it would be trouble for both Google & Microsoft.

    Integrate SUT on it (Sametime integrated with the PBX at your own business), gateways to external IMs systems, quickr, and lotus connections.... that would be imbeatable!

  1. 18  Charles Robinson http://www.cubert.net | 10/5/2009 9:14:57 AM

    You might want to work on naming. I had to read through twice to catch there is a 1000 license limit on LotusLive *NOTES*, not LotusLive *iNOTES*. I'm not buying either of them, so you can take that with a healthy dose of salt. I'm just sayin'... :-)

    You know with all this hype around never having outages you have painted a very, very large target on your back. For your sake I hope everything is rock solid. Any slight interruption, no matter how minor, is going to loose the dogs of war.

  1. 19  Keith Brooks http://www.vanessabrooks.com | 10/5/2009 10:11:33 AM

    still think it's wrong to name iNotes what isn't Domino iNotes just as a matter of fact for customers.

    But presumably more details are coming and this will right itself

  1. 20  Rob Ingram  | 10/5/2009 11:34:14 AM

    @19 - and I suppose you also think its wrong for Microsoft to use the Office brand name for all sorts of clients and server products that are not anything to do with word processing :)

    I say kudos here for a smart marketing move and Lotus Notes brand extension.

  1. 21  Erik Brooks  | 10/5/2009 10:33:27 PM

    @20 - I think a more appropriate analogy would be if MS used the "Word" brand for Works.

    I like the Lotus brand extension (especially with the marketing underway) but isn't there likely to be some serious user disconnect?

    "Oh cool, we're using iNotes? I used that at my last job... wait, this isn't anything like it. Our version had way [less/more] functionality..."

  1. 22  Almar Diehl http://www.domino-weblog.nl | 10/6/2009 4:21:43 PM

    How do mobile devices fit into LotusLive iNotes? In the commercial (https://www.lotuslive.com/styles/tours/iNotesVideo.html) I see some BlackBerries, I assume that is BIS only? How about Traveler support?

  1. 23  Ed Brill http://www.edbrill.com | 10/6/2009 8:02:06 PM

    @22 Right now through IMAP IDLE. Future plans to expand.