iNotes Can Be Saving You or Your Clients Money

How can you save money with IBM's Lotus iNotes or if you prefer LotusLive iNotes?

First a brief disclosure I will try to discuss both iNotes products but to keep some logic, LNi will be for Lotus Notes version of iNotes (webmail to you non techy people run under a Lotus Domino server) and LLi will be the LotusLive iNotes version which as one will gather has nothing to do with Domino.

Off the start, you will save bundles of money for the 1st year, if for no other reason than licensing alone, by using LLi. The average Lotus Notes license is about $75-$125 new with annual renewals being 20-30% of that price (rough numbers your contracts may vary).

LLi has no license fee and is ONLY $3 per user per month or $36/yr or even less in bulk and bought upfront(or so I am told by my sales and licensing team). So come year 5 all equals out. Of course if you really want Lotus Notes mail, then LLi is NOT for you, however, if your organization has temporary staff or doesn't need all that great Domino stuff in addition to email, this might be for you.

LNi saves you money since R8 came out. How you ask? To start there is only one mail template now, not 2 like in previous editions and no requirement to separate webmail users from Notes mail users. True some scalability issues may arise, but we have seen few companies that even come close to peaking out their servers even with a few thousand webmail people on them. So this saves server costs, disk space costs, electricity, air conditioning, real estate expenses and administrative overhead both of your IT staff and server processing.

LLi reduces your carbon footprint, at least your data center's, by relying on IBM's data centers. No buying hardware or failed drives, no cabinets, extended warranties or any of the other expenses associated with on premise email. Just use the cloud and free up some space and money all at the same time.

LNi is about breaking free from the desktop. Reducing your reliance on Operating Systems you pay for or beefy hardware. Get a Netbook or just a terminal client or a cell phone and you are good to go with your email, instant messaging, calendar and scheduling and possibly a bit more depending on your development team all from a browser. Think about it sometime.

May seem trivial, but when you throw in the space saving from DAOS for LNi or the simplicity and lack of support calls associated with LLi there are many ways to cash out using these packages.

As a side benefit you can renew the life of your development team to start writing more applications for the web and transform your entire infrastructure some day.

IBM can discuss it, you can dream it, we are doing it....today.

I encourage everyone to attend the LCTY (Lotusphere Comes to You) events or local LUG (Lotus User Group) events in your city, state, country or virtual world. Ask more questions of the speakers and other attendees about what you are missing or how to move your business forward in ways you have not even begun to think about.

If money is the only thing holding you back, we have an app for that as well.