communicate :: collaborate :: commemorate

Nobody should belittle LotusLive iNotes as enterprise class

by Volker Weber

Announced shortly before Lotusphere, IBM bough the messaging assets of the Chinese service provider Outblaze:

On April 16, 2009, IBM officially closed the Outblaze Ltd. Asset acquisition establishing the first cloud computing laboratory in Hong Kong, China. The new facility will provide a global hub for Web-based messaging services to support IBM’s emerging (www.lotuslive.com) cloud service portfolio, which offers company-to-company social networking and online collaboration tools at affordable, multi-tenant rates. The Outblaze asset purchase adds web-based email to the growing portfolio of online collaboration tools.

On their site, they explain their business model:

Outblaze has been serving their email solutions under numerous labels, totaling 70 million mailboxes. That is a lot larger than enterprise messaging systems. IBM is trying to avoid the consumer label to set themselves apart from Google Mail, but in fact they should be proud of the fact, that Outblaze scales to much larger dimensions. I don't have any public numbers available, but both Hotmail and Yahoo should have more than 250 million users and Google well over 100 million.

If it can run the "Hello Kitty" mail platform it should be able to handle yours, right?

Comments

Back in 1996, during the early days of web, I had founded a web portal that used Outblaze to provide email services to userbase that ranged above 15K. It was a site that was dedicated to a very niche market and Outblaze provided my 'hotmail' like service for my users.

Sad that I had sold it prior to the whole .com fad but I do wonder what it would've been If I hadn't sold it. Anyway..

Back to the point, I was very satisfied with the service provided by Outblaze then and I'm very confident that it *is* a far more reliable platform than the competition in 2009.

Hotmail has over 270 million users worldwide as of 2008 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotmail).
I believe currently well over 300 million

@Peter And the relevance of your comment?

I don't see many businesses using Hotmail, nor would I be suggesting a link between Hotmail and other MS cloud based services after the phishing scam that came to light today...

Ah, just reread the post and realised that Volker had quoted Hotmail numbers and hence the reason for your comment, Peter. Sorry about that...

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vowe.net is a personal website published by Volker Weber a.k.a. vowe. I am an author, consultant and systems architect based in Darmstadt, Germany.

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