Rick Whiting reports on CRN.com:
IBM this week will offer for the first time an on-demand version of its Lotus Notes messaging and collaboration application.
The move is one of several additions IBM is making to its LotusLive cloud collaboration services. The company is also debuting a low-cost bundle of LotusLive applications and adding new community features based on Lotus Connections.
LotusLive Notes, priced at $5 per user per month, is based on the same messaging software that has been IBM Lotus’ flagship product for years. Until now the software was not available as an on-demand service because IBM had to develop multi-tenant capabilities into the Notes Domino platform, said Sean Poulley, IBM vice president of cloud computing, in an interview.
LotusLive Notes, available starting Oct. 5, provides e-mail, shared calendar, instant messaging and contact database services.
The move to a ‘on-demand’ model is more than just multi-tenant Notes in the cloud, now with this latest update, IBM can offer this solution for single-user organisations and for those that need a hybrid model – the mix of on-premise and cloud-based Notes & Domino services. This puts LotusLive Notes ahead of the alternatives from both Google and Microsoft – as IBM’s Ed Brill states (referring to Microsoft):
But it seems strange that a company that can’t even update their Exchange Online offering to a year-old version of the Exchange server and are instead stuck on the November, 2006 version, haven’t announced a next version of Exchange or Outlook, and are struggling with adoption and reliability for both their premises and cloud offerings might want to choose another competitive vector.
Now we just need IBM to allow the use of credit cards for purchase of this service on a simple flat-rate basis, and we’d have every base covered!