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Lotus attempts "Lotus Notes" on demand again


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We have seen the failed attempts for BumbleBee and even a follow-up Sametime meeting option.  Well today I read the press release from the Collaboration Summit and enjoyed the part on the Productivity Tools Symphony.  Even with the nice icons and the word free

Then came the part that really caught my eye:

Applications on Demand for Lotus Notes - making Lotus Notes 8 as a service enterprise level application hosting.

Available now, IBM's Application on Demand service provides customers with the benefits of the Lotus suite without having to invest in computing assets or skills.  This new offering provides Lotus collaboration customers with a hosted and managed environment for their mail and collaborative applications, helping improve the performance of their messaging environments while enhancing efficiencies and productivity.....  (yada yada here).  Applications on Demand for Lotus Notes currently support Lotus Sametime and Lotus Quickr, and will be extended to other Lotus collaboration products over time.


There is a slew of issues with this:
  • One of which is the direct competition with the few business partners that offer this service on the Lotus arena
  • Secondly is the whole architecture on how they intend to do this by license costs.  Where partners would pass license costs along in this type of model, Lotus seems to be undercutting that also since they of course have no license costs in essence.
  • Third, how do you fit into the giant certification tree and also with the need for multiple client access.  The previous attempt in R5 for the ASP model, was not successful.  Where has the back-end Domino code changed to allow the proper provisioning and billing controls?  Does everyone get their own root level certifier?
  • How are they going to offer multi-tenant Sametime services?
  • Wow, this might just be a web access type offering with the new DWA faster (DWA-r) coming in that same press release

I need to read more on how this will be bundled but I did not see that information released yet.