Lotus Notes . . . wait a minute

So I was surfing the net like any other day and I happen to find an interesting article named "Get out of the email business". I found this to interesting since I do research for cloud computing and email is a major thing we are going after. When you outsource something, you should only outsource things that are not mission critical and are a commodity. Email is perfect for this.

I am fully expecting it to just be another boring article about cloud computing defining what is, . . . again. To my surprise it was about a new offering that is coming to the market, LotusLive from IBM. Now I do not know what email service you use at your company but LotusNotes is definitely old and busted. Some may disagree with me, LotusNotes has lots of collaboration and extra functions that no other email system out there has. This is true but there are so many other options out there that work better than what LotusNotes can do now. "Back in the day" it was awesome. And it is no longer "back in the day".

For a long time I was trying to convince others that cloud computing is not a product but more of a different way of doing things. There are some companies that are going after the market as differentiators, Microsoft, and others as cost savers, Google. I am sure it is fairly well known you can get the Google Apps suite for $50 a user per year. By far beating out an on premise costs for email system. LotusLive is coming out at $36 a year if you have a yearly contract or $3.75 if you pay monthly. IBM is now letting users pay month rather than yearly, micro payments here we come. This is under even what Google offers, that's impressive.

Hold the phone one minute though before you start singing praises or think someone beat Google at its own game. LotusLive offers an inbox size of 1 GB per user not 25 GB. While my post is a knee jerk reaction to seeing this offering I have yet to actually get my hands on it. All that aside it is something I will taking a hard look at.