The Cloud-Based E-Mail Picture Starts To Clear Up

Earlier this fall, IBM, Armonk, N.Y., launched the latest segment of its LotusLive suite of cloud solutions: LotusLive iNotes. While Lotus Notes has been attempting to battle back against Microsoft's Exchange platform for several years on desktops and clients--especially in light of all the multibillion-dollar finance industry mergers and takeovers during the past year--Microsoft has been struggling to develop and roll out its technology in pure cloud form. Hosted Exchange offerings by third-party solution providers have driven its platform into the cloud space, but with a level of complexity and cost.

IBM iNotes competes favorably against hosted Exchange solutions, and IBM's LotusLive continues to grow as a strategic alternative for the channel in driving the first, critical part of the cloud buildout for many clients.

The CRN Test Center decided to take a look at both LotusLive iNotes as well as the cloud e-mail offering by upstart Rackspace, which provides its own cloud mail along with limited, hosted Exchange functionality. The finding: Each solution could be viewed as a cost-effective alternative for solution providers who would like to deliver manageable, hosted options. Both have their limitations, as do many cloud applications during this stage of the buildout, but each is solid enough to take the stage alongside Google Apps or some other hosted Exchange solutions.

First things first: iNotes has been around since the early part of the decade as the Web-accessible version of Lotus Notes, competing with Microsoft's Outlook Web Access (OWA). What IBM began doing differently this fall was to put iNotes entirely in "the cloud," making it available at $3 per month, per user, without the additional overhead, cost and complexity of first installing it on-premise.

Second: IBM has decided to include the cloud-based iNotes in its suite of LotusLive-branded offerings. This makes sense for several reasons, namely that it provides a one-stop shop for the Lotus channel to find hosted solutions for collaboration and meeting, contact management and CRM, business networking (as opposed to social networking), IM and now e-mail and calendaring. All services can be managed from the same LotusLive Dashboard.

To get an individual user up and running on iNotes is almost as simple as setting up a standard, free Webmail account. IBM iNotes provides straightforward, Web-based, Pop3, IMAP and authenticated SMTP flavors, more-than-ample 1 GB of e-mail storage, and integrated antivirus and spam protection (meaning a potential overlap if an enterprise already has that protection in place). It also supports IMAP IDLE for an assortment of mobile devices based on Symbian, Treo and other platforms.

iNotes shouldn't be confused with LotusLive Notes, a more robust, hosted application with greater choice in security, including spam and virus filtering, backup and restore, and a choice between two different SLAs. INotes is stripped down to the essentials, putting it more on par with Gmail or (as we'll see in a few paragraphs) Rackspace hosted Email.

IBM pitches LotusLive iNotes as a method of migrating a business from on-premise e-mail to hosted e-mail, in a simple, quick way. After reviewing the product, that's an easy assumption with which to agree. Using LotusLive iNotes, for example, to move a small business or workgroup from hosted Notes to cloud-based e-mail, contact management and calendaring is a must-consider.

By comparison, Rackspace, San Antonio, provides two tiers of hosted e-mail. One tier, at a cost of $1 per month per user, provides standard Webmail and Outlook integration.

The CRN Test Center signed up for a free trial period for the $1-per-month service. To integrate an e-mail account with the Test Center's domain took only a few minutes. But for the cost, it's hard to argue with the depth, quality and ease of use of the administration tools Rackspace provides. Like LotusLive iNotes, Rackspace's cloud-based e-mail offering provides strong potential to begin moving enterprises to a hybrid model of IT at a very nice up-front cost.

Importantly, Rackspace Email supports BlackBerry, iPhone and Windows Mobile devices.

A more robust, hosted Exchange offering bumps the cost up to $12.95 per user, per month.

With an anticipated move of many companies to, at the least, a "hybrid" model of information technology that includes part on-premise IT and part cloud-based IT, both Rackspace and IBM provide offerings that could fit into what is emerging as a new set of best practices in this space, including:

Cloud-based products integrate easily with traditional, in-house infrastructures;

<&#149;>Management and administration can still be accessed centrally;

<&#149;>Service-level agreements are spelled out clearly on a per-user basis;

<&#149;>Cost and complexity of hosted offerings are the same as, or less than, those of on-premise offerings;

<&#149;>Security is woven into the fabric of any cloud offering;

<&#149;>Cloud offerings can move up the ladder in terms of both functionality and scale, to provide any sized enterprise with a clear path of growth.

A downside to each offering--but really, to cloud-based applications in general--is an absence of benchmarking tools and simple reporting capabilities to provide VARs, solution providers and CIOs with uptime and latency measurements. And there are uptime hiccups.

For example, as we were evaluating Rackspace's Email, a warning was posted at the administrator console advising of forthcoming maintenance on its Exchange 2007 environment and for mailboxes to be moved. "... (D)uring the mailbox move, users may experience intermittent interruptions of connectivity to their Microsoft Exchange 2007 mailboxes via POP/IMAP/SMTP/RPC over HTTPS and Outlook Web Access protocols," the warning noted. "Subscribed mobile messaging functionality will be unavailable in conjunction with the mailbox connectivity interruption. Messages destined to your mailboxes may be queued and delivered once the maintenance has been completed with no loss of e-mail."

Rackspace noted, "The larger the mailbox data and more messages, the more time it will take to move it. We estimate an individual 1GB (mailbox) with average number of messages may last approximately 30 minutes to about 1 hour."

While the maintenance time is reasonable, and Rackspace appears to have taken care to get the word out, such maintenance and downtime are clearly out of the hands of an individual enterprise. Rackspace, too, also suffered a widely publicized unplanned outage within the past year that impacted some of its services; we would like to see more transparency to the market on performance issues throughout the industry as a whole. While IBM with its LotusLive offering and Rackspace with its hosted Email are more business-friendly than other cloud offerings, the area of benchmarking and transparency provide those companies with an even stronger opportunity for leadership.

For now, we can recommend both LotusLive iNotes and Rackspace's branded, hosted Email as nice, straightforward offerings for smaller businesses or as an opportunity to begin migrating other enterprises to a hybrid model. We also look forward to watching both expand and improve their offerings as time moves on.