Got IBM Mail yet?

In case you were wondering, I have not gone into hiding, contrary to the trolls.

Want to just run this by you as I know someone out there has been scratching their head asking what is IBM talking about with all this talk of mail, mail, mail.

Mail in this case is of course, email.

You remember email, the thing everyone said was dead, like the mainframe?

Email, that scapegoat of corporate executives who live in fear people will realize their company is close to bankruptcy or some other financial catastrophe and so they announce a new email direction.

IBM spent quite a bit of resources, and will continue to do so, to keep pushing the envelope of email.

But no one calls it email anymore except us old dinosaurs that carry Blackberries.(Disclosure: I never owned one or carried one except for one client for 6 months) Seriously, it is now just mail.

But not just any mail, no, you have at least 4 variations of mail now from IBM.

Mail Next
The most obvious one, yet least viewed publicly, is "Mail Next". Simply put, this is a browser based mail product that runs on Domino. Think of it as a far ahead view of Webmail/iNotes/Domino Web Access for the next generation. Lots of analysts that get paid to write about it have, go read their posts if you want to know the future. This post is for the admins and executives that need to know where we all stand today and the near future. ETA of client, probably when R10 or IBM Notes Rnext comes out in 2015 sometime. IBM does not like to name products prior to launch.

IBM Notes
This leads us to IBM Notes which continues to bring in licensing revenue of an estimated $1.2 BILLION a year. As already stated, look for the next release in 2015 probably and as inroads have been made to expand the client repertoire to browser based Notes workspaces among other advances. Still based on Domino. No word if this will be rebranded as IBM Connections Notes or something else.

IBM Connections Mail
What is this IBM Connections Mail we heard about? Yes, IBM has re-branded their product lines again. If sports teams can change their jerseys and logos and colors every year, companies can change the names of products. IBM Connections is the new brand where the IBM Notes products will reside under. However, this IBM Connections Mail has been around for about 2 years now and it is a way to surface your email and calendar into IBM Connections. It is based on Domino and also runs for Exchange. It is expected that this integration will get stronger and span more aspects over time.

IBM SmartCloud Notes
IBM® SmartCloud™ Notes® is a full-featured email, calendar, contact management and instant messaging service in the IBM cloud. And it runs on Domino. For those of you that do not want or need an infrastructure in your office of servers, this should help you and while itis not free, it is pretty inexpensive.

So you see mail, or email, is useful and sexy again for those dinosaurs that need it and aside from one man, we all still need it.