IBM on Thursday will tout a big cloud computing win. Consumer electronics giant Panasonic will migrate a total of 300,000 employees and partners off of Microsoft Exchange and other collaboration technologies to Big Blue’s LotusLive platform.
The migration, which will be detailed at IBM’s Lotusphere conference next week, will start with 100,000 employees and expand to more 300,000 workers, suppliers and partners over time.
IBM is hailing the move as “the largest enterprise cloud computing deployment in history.” Update: However, IBM’s deployment isn’t the largest cloud deployment in history. SuccessFactors landed a 420,000 seat deployment with Siemens and also nailed a 300,000 seat deployment with a large retailer.
There’s quite the dogfight in this space. Google is wooing IT executives to move from Exchange to its Google Apps platform for mail and calendar services. IBM’s LotusLive unit is trying to undercut Google in the enterprise. And Microsoft is duking it out with both Google and Big Blue.
This scrum means nice negotiating leverage for IT buyers.
Specifically, Panasonic will use IBM LotusLive for:
- Web conferencing;
- File sharing;
- Instant messaging;
- Project management;
- Email;
- Calendaring;
- And contact management.
Update 2: Microsoft had a to-the-point response to the IBM news. In a blog post, Julia White, Director, Exchange Product Management, said:
These claims around Panasonic compel me to shed some light on the real facts. Panasonic, which has just under 300,000 employees, was already using Notes worldwide, and fewer than 4% of their employees were using Exchange Server – most of them in North America. As with many recent IBM claims, this win is little more than keeping an existing customer. Then again, with a multi-year trend of declining Lotus market share, perhaps keeping an existing customer is a win.
Also: IBM beefs up Lotus Connections with enterprise microblogging
