To be fair, though, IBM is not reporting anything about how they're doing compared to SharePoint — that's something we'll be watching over the next year.

New big name customers
IBM has won many new Lotus Notes customers, the biggest increase since the release of Notes Domino 8.0 in August 2007, and has benefitted from renewed commitments from existing customers. New Lotus Notes wins over Microsoft include The Coca-Cola Company, Nationwide, Southern California Edison, Linde Group, Global Hyatt Corp., CEMEX, 3M, The Hartford, Banco do Brazil, Banca Intesa Sanpaolo and Petrobas, among others.

In addition, a number of customers worldwide have chosen to standardize on Lotus Notes over Microsoft Exchange, as well as migrate their existing Exchange environments to the latest versions of Notes/Domino 8. They include Minolta, Toshiba, Continental AG, EVONIK, Caja Espana, Bank of New York Mellon, Kendle, Kohl's, Constructora San Jose, Banco do Brazil, Banco Antonveneta, Hitachi, Freightliner, Manulife, Sherwin Williams, Belden Wire, Ministry Of Finance Belgium, John Hancock, Ton Yang, Air France, Danone, SunTel, INEOS, Werner Enterprises and Payflex.

SaaS, Symphony, and the sweet smell of success
IBM reports than in recent engagements, they have been helping customers improve their messaging economics through enhancements in performance and scalability, green initiatives, and the optional ability for IBM to provide off-premise solutions through software as a service (SaaS) and cloud services. In one recent customer engagement, IBM's assessment of existing messaging economics is helping reduce a company's operational costs by 23 percent over 12 months. The customer projects an additional $27 million in savings with the use of Lotus Symphony instead of Microsoft Office.

Economics are only one part of the equation, especially when evaluating software delivery models. IBM reports that several customers, including 3M, have shown that using some of the new capabilities in Lotus Notes 8.5 on-premise can save significant costs over other offerings such as Microsoft Online Services. In addition, Domino 8.5 has proven to reduce storage and related costs by up to 40 percent, while increasing reliability and flexibility.

Overall, this is very interesting news. In the last few months, I've spoken with many Lotus Business Partners and our advertisers, and most also report strong and solid business.

I look forward to seeing you at Lotusphere. Senior Technical Editor Mick Moignard will be there all week and News Editor Nancy Hand will be covering everything, so stay tuned. Speaking of Nancy, for those of you who read her article last week and are waiting for her Gmail article, stay tuned. Depending on what's announced next week, it'll run within a few weeks. I promise.