IBM Delivers Lotus Notes and Domino 7

IBM’s Flagship Messaging and Collaboration Platform Includes New Technology for Improving the Way People Work

ARMONK, NY -- Sep 7, 2005 -- Driven by double-digit growth and more than 500 competitive customer wins in the first half of 2005, IBM® today unveiled a major upgrade to its flagship platform with the launch of Lotus Notes® and Domino® 7. Lotus Domino 7 includes new collaboration features and tools that can help improve productivity for IT administrators and corporate application developers, as well as significant new productivity enhancements to help Lotus Notes users work more efficiently. With Lotus Notes and Domino 7, IBM has created a vastly improved collaboration platform designed to meet the evolving and expanding needs of knowledge workers.

End-user productivity is a driving factor in companies’ uses of collaboration software, and with Lotus Notes 7 users will benefit from more than 100 new features that will allow them to manage an increasing volume of information and work more efficiently. New visual indicators can help users organize and manage their in-box by highlighting high priority messages, as well as differentiating between group emails and messages targeted for specific users. New memory functions will automatically save and return to open documents and applications upon shut down and restart, which will give users additional mobility without worrying about losing data or hindering productivity. And instant messaging and presence technology, already integrated in the Lotus Notes client, has been expanded across the platform, including emails and calendar items, facilitating productivity and responsiveness by instantly connecting users with experts and key contacts.

“IBM recognizes that our customers need more than just email for their collaboration needs -- as a result, IBM has evolved Lotus Notes and Domino forward as an extensive platform built to meet the business objectives of a wide variety of corporate communities, including end-users, IT administrators, application developers and the CFO’s office,” said Ken Bisconti, vice president of IBM’s Workplace, Portal and Collaboration business. “Today, tens of thousands of customers are relying on Lotus Notes and Domino to help drive their overall business, so we’ve built Lotus Notes and Domino 7 with capabilities that can increase productivity from the organizational level down to individual knowledge workers.”

Lotus Notes and Domino 7, a key component of the IBM® Workplace(TM) strategy, marks a major milestone in IBM’s product roadmap for the Lotus product family. Customers have indicated that a critical factor when choosing a software platform is a reliable, long-term product plan that won’t require additional software purchases or major migrations to upgrade. IBM is helping customers plan their software purchases and deployments by delivering new versions of Lotus Notes and Domino every 12-18 months and making it simple for customers to upgrade to new versions. As a result, IBM’s clear product roadmap and consistent delivery of new Lotus Notes and Domino technology has resulted in more than 90 percent of customers working on the most recent(1) version of the product, which is an unprecedented rate of adoption in the software industry.

“When considering a new platform to replace our aging Microsoft Exchange 5.5 environment, one of the most important elements was the long-term viability of the product,” said Jim Tieri, Director of Information Technology at Holland Company, a railway manufacturing company based in Illinois, USA. “We were planning on creating applications utilizing the new platform, and didn’t want to have to rewrite the apps every two years while keeping current with upgrades. Lotus Notes keeps us out of the ’rip and replace’ mentality.”

Server and Application Development Features Help Customers Increase Efficiency, Contain Costs
In addition to increased end-user functionality, Lotus Notes and Domino 7 extends IBM’s leadership in providing tools and functionality for IT administrators and application developers that can optimize the value of the Lotus Notes and Domino platform while leveraging existing skills and investments.

Lotus Domino 7 also includes new tools for application developers. According to customer feedback, more than 65 percent of IBM customers are building as many or more Lotus Domino-based applications this year than one year ago. The number of applications is predicted to increase with the improved development capabilities in Lotus Domino 7. However, these customers have indicated a need to protect their investment in Lotus Domino-based applications as they move closer to Web services-oriented architectures. To help meet this need, IBM has upgraded the Lotus Domino 7 toolset to expand the reach of Lotus Domino applications while protecting their investment in Lotus Domino-based applications. For example, a new Web services design element lets developers use Lotus Domino as a Web services host, giving customers the benefits of extending Lotus Domino applications as open, standards-based Web services. Additionally, Lotus Notes and Domino 7 provides developers with the option of using either traditional NSF storage features or IBM DB2 as the foundation for new and existing applications. This new capability gives developers the option of leveraging open-standard SQL (Structured Query Language) and choosing the technology that best fits their skills and business needs.

New IT administration tools can increase performance and scalability while helping to lower costs. Through internal benchmarking, IBM projects that this release will allow many customers to run up to 50 percent more users per server, requiring up to 25 percent less CPU capacity for the same workload. In addition, new autonomic monitoring tools and the inclusion of Tivoli Analyzer technology can save customers money by automatically alerting administrators to potential performance issues before they occur, helping administrators maximize their IT resources and avoiding costly server crashes and downtime.

Pricing and Availability
The IBM Lotus Notes and Domino 7 product family, including Lotus® Sametime® 7, Lotus® QuickPlace® 7, Lotus Domino Designer 7, Lotus Domino Web Access, the Lotus Domino Express products and other product offerings is now generally available.

IBM Lotus Domino server software starts at an SRP of $1145 per CPU, while IBM Lotus Notes software starts at SRP $101 per client. IBM Lotus Domino Web Access 7, IBM’s Web-based messaging client, starts at SRP of $70 per client.

Lotus Domino 7 is currently available for Microsoft Windows 2000, Windows 2003; IBM iSeries, zSeries (z/OS and Linux), AIX 5.2 or 5.3; Sun Solaris 9; and Linux (x86) -- SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 8 or 9. Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 4 and Sun Solaris 10 support will be available within 30 days.

Lotus Notes 7 is available for Windows 2000 and XP. Support for the Mac OS is planned for future release of Lotus Notes. Lotus Domino Web Access 7 is available on Microsoft Internet Explorer (Win32), Mozilla 1.7x (Linux) and Firefox 1.0.x (Win32 & Linux).

For details on the entire array of Lotus Notes and Domino 7 products, please visit www.lotus.com/products/product4.nsf/wdocs/notesdomino

About IBM
IBM is the world’s largest information technology company, with 80 years of leadership in helping businesses innovate. IBM Software offers a wide range of middleware and operating systems for all types of computing platforms, allowing customers to take full advantage of the on demand era. The fastest way to get more information about IBM software is through the IBM Software home page at http://www.software.ibm.com

Contact Information

Michael Shamrell

IBM Media Relations

IBM

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