Nokia and IBM announce Lotus Notes Traveler for S60 devices

One thing I like about current Nokia devices is that they are quite open to supporting a wide range of individual and enterprise needs with services and applications designed to help you out. I enjoy their support of Exchange ActiveSync on my E71 and other devices so I was pleased to hear the latest news on a conference call yesterday. Nokia and IBM announced today that they are partnering to bring enterprise users Lotus Notes Traveler to the S60 3rd Edition platform. Gartner data shows that IBM has a 40% share of corporate email revenue and now with Nokia's support of Microsoft Exchange, Novell Groupwise, and others Nokia supports almost all corporate email solutions with their devices.

Key features of the new Lotus Notes Traveler include:

• Real-time IBM Lotus Notes email/PIM push solution with no middleware required
• Automatic real-time replication of Lotus Domino email, calendar, address book, journal, and to do lists
• Full email retrieval with attachment support
• OTA installation and easy setup and activation
• Authentication lockout support
• Contacts synced automatically back to the server (part of Lotus Notes 8.0)

Lotus Notes Traveler will have a plug-in for the standby screen on devices like the E71 and will also appear as part of the standard Nokia messaging client where you will see Lotus Notes Traveler in your list of email accounts.

I work for a very small firm and have never used Lotus Notes or Domino before, but understand there are over 140 millions seats that have been sold worldwide in use by over 46,000 companies. IBM has seen 16 consecutive quarters of growth from Q4 2004 through Q3 2008 so this is an important step for Nokia to reach out to the enterprise. I am excited about the future of the Eseries given this support of more corporate clients.

The new Lotus Notes Traveler will be available before the end of this year through your IBM channel partner.

With this expanded support for the enterprise customer, I hope that we see more roll out of S60 devices here in the U.S. According to The Boy Genius Report, the fabulous E71 will be coming to AT&T soon as the E71x and since they have a device with AT&T branding I think this moves out of the rumor mill and into reality.