A major coup for Lotus

Panasonic will be migrating its users worldwide from Microsoft Exchange to LotusLive, IBM's cloud-based Notes service. Although 100,000 users will be involved in the initial migration, a total of 300,000 internal and external users will eventually be migrated. More information is available at CNET.

The win is a big one for IBM on two fronts: first, this is a major win for IBM which has seen some of its customers migrate away from Notes to Exchange. Second, and perhaps more importantly, this is an enormous cloud deployment, the largest to date. It follows the March 2009 announcement that GlaxoSmithKline would migrate 100,000 users to Microsoft BPOS.

While many view cloud-based email and collaboration as primarily for SMBs, that simply is not the case anymore. The Panasonic announcement, and the GSK announcement early last year, should help decision makers to realize that.