Leadership By Numbers

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LotusLive iNotes has been unveiled. There is only one question to ask about LotusLive iNotes, "what is unique about one more on-line email service ?" The answer is, "a lot." I've been trying it out, and there is potential.

• It's business email that is spartan.
• It's already well-established because it's built on last year's purchase of Outblaze, with 18 million accounts.
• IBM is claiming "security" and "stability" as their foundation.
• It's cost-competitive.
• It's one more move forward on a very large chessboard.

Most of the early write-ups about LotusLive have announced it as a competition between Google Apps and LotusLive. After all, Google Apps is $50 a year as compared to LotusLive's $36. A closer look at LotusLive, I think, reveals that IBM's target is more likely Microsoft. Google Apps comes with a full suite of on-line applications and a 25 G inbox. Lotus does offer a zero-cost, off-line, Lotus Symphony Suite for applications, but it is more a desktop replacement to Microsoft Office than an alternative to Google Apps. In any case, it hasn't been packaged with LotusLive.

The media focus on a war with Google mail is natural, as it has suffered a short series of mail outages that have bruised its reputation for reliability. IBM is certainly looking to pick up customers where it can, as Lotus executive Sean Poulley alludes that there "is a world of difference between supporting a consumer-grade service and a business-grade service." Poulley may be slighting Google Apps for reliability, but he is also calling out the focus of LotusLive: it's "business-grade." And, in IT there are only a fistful of companies that can lay claim to this standard, including Microsoft with its lock on the corporate desktop.

Recently, IBM/Lotus has begun developing solutions that are successfully challenging Microsoft on its home field, and off. The recent press release of "Lotus Gains" has been widely distributed in the news media. U.S. Bank, PNC Bank, Continental Tires are others have been willing to publically voice their endorsement of Lotus technology in a seeming about-face against a widely held belief of Microsoft's invulnerability in office and messaging solutions.

IBM is also offering low-cost hosting for Blackberry messaging servers as well as releasing their own Lotus Traveler 8.5.1 to directly support Apple's iPhone, Windows Mobile and Nokia's E72. Obviously, Mobile platforms is becoming an interest for IBM, taking them places that seem a natural fit, but also some that are unlikely.

One of IBM's most recent annoucements has been for their partnering with Canonical and VERDE to provide an inexpensive netbook platform for "open standards-based email, word processing, spreadsheets, unified communication, social networking and other software" in the developing economies of Africa. I'm an unabashed fanboy of Canonical's Ubuntu, and I've worked first hand with VERDE's impressive Virtual Desktop Integration. This is a polished, well-constructed platform that is going to serve well in sub-saharan Africa.

Looking at LotusLive framed within the context of all the other recent Lotus initatives presents a Seurat image of pointilism, which is clearer at a distance, than it is up close. LotusLive iNotes is basic web-mail that marks the entrance of Lotus into a cloud offering, with options for on-line screensharing, Lotus Engage, Lotus Connections, and more. Here's what I found with LotusLive iNotes:

The inbox presents an uncluttered interface. It's a feature of LotusLive iNotes to eschew any advertising.

The inbox presents a paging GUI for mail.

Creating a new email presents a stripped-down, functional rich-text editor.

The calendar provides the usual view choices of day, week and month. It's possible to also create a company calendar.

Interestingly, the support resources are built on Lotus Notes Wikis, looking like the latest 8.5 release.

LotusLive iNotes is a member of a family of products for on-line collaboration. We can expect to hear much more about these services as "Engage" and "Connections" have received positive reviews.

After reviewing LotusLive iNotes, in the context of Lotus' recent accomplishments, it's not such a stretch to understand why such basic, web-based, "business-grade" email would be casting a shadow against Microsoft's ambitions. It does highlight Steve Ballmer's peculiar criticism against IBM for dropping hardware and moving deeply into services. On-line, cloud services is the next battlefield for technical dominance and IBM/Lotus has already begun a formidable offense. The latest moves by Lotus is a classic turn-around strategy where the many, smaller moves by the side pieces were not viewed as threatening until, of course, all the chessmen have begun to come together.



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