Microsoft Office 2010 Home And Business IBM throws

IBM has introduced a brand new hosted e-mail providing, LotusLive Notes, that it is pricing at $5 per consumer each month.
IBM is touting the latest addition to its LotusLive family as offering e-mail, calendaring and instant messaging. Other pieces of the LotusLive family members of hosted services also provide Web conferencing, social networking and collaboration. The integrated suite of services goes for $10 per consumer each month.
Microsoft final yr cut its hosted companies pricing to ensure that Exchange On-line is $5 per user each month, and its integrated Organization Productivity On the internet Services (BPOS) bundle is $10 per user each month. Microsoft also delivers a stripped-down hosted Exchange and SharePoint clients, known as Deskless Employee clients, for $2 per consumer each month (or $3 per consumer monthly for any bundle with the two).
IBM introduced an offering final 12 months known as LotusLive iNotes, which the organization also touted as being a hosted e-mail providing. It had been priced at $3 per user each month and included hosted email, calendar and make contact with management capabilities.
According to Wikipedia, one can find numerous distinctions among the 2. LotusLive Notes allows a buyer to make use of their set up of Lotus Notes to accessibility an installation of the Lotus Domino e-mail and calendar server that is hosted and managed by IBM Lotus. (It;s the new identify of Lotus Notes Hosted Messaging, Wikipedia says.) LotusLive iNotes is really a Web-based e-mail/calendaring support which is built about the assets IBM acquired fom buying Outblaze, a Hong Kong-based application services supplier (ASP), Wikipedia says.
LotusLive iNotes “genuinely targets smaller businesses with a basic email offerings,” an IBM spokesperson said. (In other words, it can be more like Microsoft;s Deskless Employee.) LotusLive Notes “helps businesses protect their current e mail investments by serving as being a virtual extension of a firm;s on-premises Lotus Domino domains,” the spokesperson added. (So LotusLive Notes sounds more like Exchange Internet.)
“LotusLive Notes single point of entry to e-mail, calendaring, contacts and immediate messaging from the IBM cloud. New to this release is ‘hybrid; capabilities for integrating with an existing Domino infrastructure, enabling provider administrators to continue to manage users and groups utilizing the on-premises tools with which they are familiar,” the spokesperson added.
New capabilities that are part of LotusLive Notes include e-mail retention of content of users; e-mail messages for later legal discovery; onboarding, data migration and custom mail template services (by way of IBM Software Solutions); and assistance for 21 additional languages.
The onboarding service and free trial options could be a draw, but the relatively small number of partners for LotusLive Notes could hamper the providing, said IDC analyst Robert Mahowald.
However, “IBM has a large base of buyers with 1000+ users which are old-school Notes shops, and for which they have engineered some good selling scenarios for on-premise + LotusLive deployments. So as an IT individual you get flexibility in how you want to deploy this, on-premise, and subscribe to some things- your choice. That;s very much like Microsoft, and it helps them both stand out against Google - in addition to the fact that even in outsourcing scenarios, IT departments still value real-time portals on help desk tickets, usage patterns for internal charge-back,Microsoft Office 2007 Ultimate, etc, which Google does not provide out of the box (though it could be added through integrators),” he said.
The day before IBM;s LotusLive Notes rollout, Microsoft announced a number of new buyers for its BPOS bundle,Microsoft Office 2010 Home And Business, including DuPont, Spotless Group Ltd. and Sunoco Inc. Microsoft also recently touted that it had convinced a single with the biggest messaging migration tool vendors, Binary Tree, to move from Google to BPOS.
It;s not just a three-way horse race among IBM, Microsoft and Google in the hosted business-app space, Mahowald noted. Adobe has some with the cloud collaboration providers, but lacks e-mail, he said. Cisco has yet to put thesee solutions into a “container” the way Microsoft and IBM have. Zoho is in there too.
One thing that has been important for Google and Microsoft,Windows 7 Home Premium Key, Mahowald said, “is actually a tie to the office productivity tools: Microsoft has Office Via the internet, IBM has Symphony (that is free, but NOT on-line),Windows 7 Home Premium, Google has Apps, Zoho has Apps,Office 2007 Ultimate, Adobe has their via the internet version, but Cisco does not.”