IBM's announcement today of their Lotus Live iNotes hosted e-mail service (like just about everyone else, they're calling it a "cloud" service; it's not, at least not in any meaningful way that I can see, just plain old Software as a Service... not that there is anything wrong with that) has punditry in a tither. Well, it's a low-grade tither, anyway. I guess there isn't enough caffeine flowing yet, or maybe it's just that IBM doesn't seem to be tremendously threatening to anyone as the pace of these Internet based offerings becomes more and more rapid. At any rate, it's not about the service itself, which IBM claims already hosts some 18 million mail accounts; no, instead the important thing everyone is trying to gauge is whether Big Blue is gunning for Microsoft, or Google, with this offering. Maybe both.

IBM claims the service is aimed particularly at the SMB market, which might mean the target is Google, whose Gmail has seen the greatest adoption in that segment. But then Microsoft's hosted mail and collaboration offerings are closer in features to the Notes suite, so maybe IBM is going after them in the enterprise arena. Or both! Who can say?

I think the real news is that if you like Notes and you are a fan of scalable SaaS solutions, there is finally a well-supported hosted Notes solution at a reasonable price ($3 per user per month; right in line with both Microsoft's pricing for the Deskless Worker Suite and Google's Premier Apps pricing) available for you. Companies have been able to cut deals for rudimentary web-based e-mail service hosting in a pseudo-SaaS model for a decade now, and hosted Exchange solutions have been available and trustworthy for at least the last three years. But if you were a fan of the Notes flavor of collaborative communications, and there is a small but significant subset of you out there, you've been out of luck. Well, welcome to the game! Maybe LA needs to add this to the menu in the apocalyptic battle for control of its e-mail services.