So much for mSuite5. Nokia announced today that it will launch a new software application next month with IBM to bring OEM Lotus Notes support to select S60 phones. The Lotus Notes Traveler solution will become available initially for 44 different handset models and will make S60 accessible to “140 million licensed [Lotus Notes] users”. 140 million, eh? It’s pretty safe to say that while there might be 140 million Lotus Notes licenses out there, the number of active users is likely a bit lower. According to research conducted earlier this year by Ferris Research, the enterprise email / PIM solution market in the US and Europe breaks down like this:
- Exchange: 65%
- Internal POP/IMAP: 15%
- Lotus Notes: 10%
Curious. While 10% is unaccounted for (or error margin perhaps), Lotus Notes still has the overwhelming minority of the enterprise market. As such, we have to ask: Why? S60 handsets still have fantastically inadequate Exchange support and yet Nokia is dumping resources into supporting the least-commonly used enterprise solution on the market. We hope the answer lies in a handful of major contracts Nokia will be awarded as a result of this new announcement, but don’t expect today’s news to have any significant impact on Nokia’s enterprise market share outside of said possible pending contracts.
