Here’s the deal: whenever a vendor does something that I think is, all around, a good idea, I start to get suspicious of myself. It’s that demo glow thing. Worse, when they start finally doing something they should have been doing so long ago, but haven’t, that you’ve given up believing that they would actually do it…you’re sort of all screwed up in your head in this analyst business.

That, dear readers, is my reaction at 20,000 feet (literally and figuratively) to this year’s Lotusphere. IBM actually released an application that ends in a .com. They’ve got SaaS, friends, and they’re not ashamed of it.

Side-note: Spring-loading Your Tea-leaves

Side-note: remember “SaaS”? It was the in-thing before “cloud.” Track how far back it was to when SaaS was that the cool kids were doing – 3 years, maybe? – and you’ve got a good idea of how long it takes IBM to “catch-up” to what those raskly startups are doing. The contemporary lesson is to apply that time-stick to cloud computing. IBM still has 2-3 years before they’re release a serious product it’d seem.

“And all I gotta do is act naturally…”

While at Lotusphere, IBM’ers kept telling me about the crabbing from the blogs about LotusLive.com. Indeed. It’s sort of like NetBeans to Eclipse. But that’s the kind of thing you expect from dancing elephants.

Here’s where things do get screwy with LotusLive.com in the here-and-now: it’s still targeted at the same money-hogs that IBM has based it’s air-supply on these many years: The Companies Who Run The World, the Fortune-We-Don’t-Use-37Signals-Hundred. Yeah, those guys who’re laying off thousands of people now and hoarding their cash like The Road is about to lay us all out.

The talk of the Lotus-heads was of optimizing companies with 10,000+ employees. Big boys, dear readers. Would RedMonk, a virtual company of 5 people profit from using LotusLive.com? Could we even afford it?

Sears is a Mid-market Company

IBM is still not going after the S in “SMB” full-force like you’d think of from a SaaS offering. “M” gets in there under the moniker General Business, which is fine, but still gets the stripped down offerings at the drive-thru. Their interest is in processing RFPs and POs, not email addresses and credit cards.

For any talk you might hear about IBM selling to the Fortune One Million, they’re not really interested at this point. My take is that Lotus is going through what the other IBM brands would call “modernization”: take the existing customer base and bring them up-to-date to “modern” technology. Over in Rational and z, they’ve got EGL to move us from languages and platforms, of which, COBAL is the only one we can remember, only because of Y2K.

The perception for sometime has been that the Lotus world is stagnant, allowing Microsoft and even Trustafarians like Google to stumble into success, Lawrence of Arabian’ there way to Damascus. A perfect, but stagnant tecosystem always falls pray to the good enough up-start with a finger on the plunger. Sure, it only has 40% of the functionality and it doesn’t know how to spell ISO, SOX, PCI, or talk to MIL: but it works, it’s cheap, and damned if that email quota and 10 meg Reply-All email attachements becomes a non-issue.

Lotus has been in desperate need of catching up to the times – beyond the dazzling array of internal and research-driven applications – and it seems like they’ve finally gotten their footing a little ways up a very large mountain.

The $340,000 Question

Which brings the question back to one of cost. Any number you hear at a vendor show that has to do with cost is suspect, but let’s dance around with some.

At the 10,000 and above level, it was said at one keynote, Lotus believes they 30-40% cost savings on the average price of $10/user/month for email and calendaring. Let’s take the lowest there, the 30%. So, we’ve got Lotus messaging costing us $7/user/month, with a minimum of 10,000 users:

($10 - 30%) X 12 months X 10,000 users == $840,000/year

Then, let’s take Google Apps at a non-discounted price of $50/year/user. (Hold your comments about functionality: it’s coming.):

($50/user/year X 10,000) = $500,000

So, Lotus’ challenge is to justify that extra $340,000.

Sure the functionality that Lotus messaging and calendaring provides might be a immense compared to Google Apps. But how do you, and IT budget holder in, Staring Into The Economic Abyss, measure that immensitude?

You’ve got backup tapes with countless credit cards lost in the backs of cars. You’ve got regulations. You’ve got an endless amount of FUD out there, but if the risk management pounds of flesh on that FUD comes up to $340,000 or less: what’re you going to do?

Never Trust a Number

Lookit: these are all funny numbers from some weird spreadsheet-cum-PDF with data points from 4AM benders. But, it gives you a start for understanding the trade-offs IT buyers have to make in the segment that Lotus once ruled. The real delta could be $5,000. It could be $500,000. All that matters is that Lotus is the Lexus, Microsoft is the Mazda, and Google is the Geo.

My high-school economics teacher gave me a nice piece of advice I’ve yet to apply in my life: a car is just a thing that gets you from Point A to Point B.

Email…calendaring…IM…”messaging”…social software has become that, in spades. To justify that $340,000, Lotus will need to bring innovation, easy to sell, profit-causing features full-force. Catching up with a SaaS offering is fantastic, no doubt, but there’s no room to drop the ball this time to someone with a better a outlook or a funny name.

Disclosure: IBM is a client and covered T&E to Lotusphere. Microsoft is a client as well, as are Microsoft and The Eclipse Foundation. Google once gave me some nice gloves (kisses!).

There’s a local, Austin startup here called OtherInbox that I’ve been using for around a month or so now. Their premise is that there’s plenty of so called “ham” in your email that’s – to use my cynical diction – annoying but useful. You know, all those App Store receipts (why do I get a receipt for paying nothing?) and notifications that someone’s added you in Facebook (“hey, thanks for the add!”).

What it Does

The mechanics of this are straight forward: when you start using OtherInbox, it sorts out your email into different folders (as seen above). Once your email is sorted out into different folders, you can read the emails, delete them, or (one of the potentially more interesting features) “block” further email to address.

The folder sorting is based on the address the emails are sent to (see below) and, it seems some other heuristics. The simplest way get OtherInbox wired up is to start using the new email address it gives you. That’s right, OtherInbox gives you a new email address. For me, that was anything@cote.otherinbox.com, where “anything” could be any word I wanted. So, for example, I could have switched over my Amazon email address to amazon@cote.otherinbox.com.

Now, you’re probably thinking: I don’t want another damn email address. That was my first reaction too. There’s a couple other options as well.

Adding Your Own Domain Name

First, you can setup any domain name you have to start sending email to OtherInbox. I have several domain names that I don’t really use for anything. I wanted a short email address that’d be easier to thumb into the iPhone when logging into web sites, so I wired up lacecard.com to OtherInbox. Thus, instead of using anything@cote.otherinbox.com as my OtherInbox address, I can now use anything@lacecard.com. The lacecard.com address is much easier to type in than cote.otherinbox.com but also the one I used to use, coteindustries.com.

(I see they also own oib.com, which might be a nice shortener as well if I got a single letter username.)

GMail Hook-up

The second option for customizing your email address is to hook-up OtherInbox to GMail. I’m in a beta program for testing this at the moment. It’s working marginally well, given it’s a beta.

Here, OtherInbox goes into your GMail account and pulls out email from it, sorting them into OtherInbox folders and moving the emails out of your inbox. It doesn’t delete the emails from GMail; it just moves them to your All Mail/archive folder, out of the inbox. Also, it doesn’t seem to mess with Labels and filters you’ve setup in GMail.

There’s a certain spookiness here in letting some other service mess with your email, but its gone well so far. The effect is what you see above: a whole bunch of folders from all the chuckle-heads who send me email. More importantly, so far, those chuckle-heads have seemed to be businesses and organizations instead of individuals. Maybe I’m looking through the email wrong, but it seems pretty good at sniffing out the semantics of a From: address to be a company rather than say, my wife.

What’s a little buggy about it so far is that I’ve surfaced some spam that GMail had previously hidden from me, like that CNN folder. I setup some filter in GMail to just delete these little guys, but they keep showing up in OtherInbox. Also, I’m not sure if the “Block All” feature is bi-directional to GMail, or even working: I thought I blocked those silly CNN and hi5 ones. (No offense to hi5.)

The Semantic Inbox

More so than what OtherInbox does now, the thing I’m interested in are the “coming soon” features. Things like detecting and collecting together receipts, building up a calendar from your email, find coupons, and do other things like “track spending.”

I haven’t seen anything along these lines yet, but they sound promising. I do a lot of calendar and receipt based things daily – scheduling meetings across time zones and organizations, building up digital piles of expenses for expense reports – and anything that helps along those lines is fantastic. As a small example, in both GMail and Mail.app you can easily create new calendar entries from text like “1/29 at 9AM PST,” which I use all the time.

To use the (now) horky term in the sub-section title here, OtherInbox wants to ferret out the semantics of all your email and actually do things with them. That’d be fantastic.

The Usual Concerns

While writing this, someone DM’ed me in Twitter asking about the privacy and security of OtherInbox. As he pointed out, it’d be perfect for ID theft. Indeed. GMail and Yahoo! Mail would be too: the only thing you have to go off is trusting the OtherInbox folks not to be evil. Google has seen fit to cover themselves with a motto on that one, which is about all one can ask for. That said, the OtherInbox people are a legit, real company here in Austin, not just some .com site out there in the clouds waiting to for the order to DoS Estonia.

On the other hand, the founders are from the e-marketing world and you can bet that part of their revenue is taking advantage of the channel they’re building up here: 10,000 registered users so far. I don’t see anything too wrong with this, esp. given the price of OtherInbox.

RedMonk client Spiceworks‘ business-model is similarly predicated on taking advantage of channel of cleaned-up attention. Spiceworks has managed to carve out a happy user base and, from what they tell me, a happy base of people using their channel. The same can be said of GMail, Yahoo! Mail, MSN, Facebook, etc.

Also, speculating on my own here, there’s the possibility to simply offering paying for the service instead of having it be ad-supported. Using them as an example again, Spiceworks provides this an option for people who’d rather pay cash, instead of attention, for their software.

The End Effect

Despite the current simplicity of OtherInbox and the weird behavior in the beta level GMail integration, I actually like using OtherInbox. It make me spend less time sorting out my personal email, this despite the fact that it doesn’t work perfectly. Sure, it’s still a dancing bear, but that’s why it’s in invite only beta, right?

Thinking on this, I realize that a large part of that is due to simply getting it out of my face minute-by-minute. Instead of seeing new emails pop into my inbox, the primary way I see most of my email now is the daily summary that OtherInbox sends me. Scanning a batch like that is great.

Clearly, their challenge for 2009 is to move beyond the bear and get a legit dancer up there; that is, implement all those interesting semantic features. To pluck an artificial date out of the air (that’d be good for marketing, though), hopefully they’ve setup SXSWi as a date for new features.

Also, it should be noted that the OtherInbox team has been extremely high-touch so far with their community. Not only are they active in Twitter, but the mailing list for their GMail integration beta is much more active than I would have though. Oh, and the iPhone interface ain’t too shabby either, see above.

Email: The Unfixable Problem

On a wider scale, email has long been the number one tool of information workers. The GTD-nuts and the Cult of Zero Inbox have done a good job of innovating principals around dealing with email, but for as old and vital as email is, there hasn’t been much evolution of the technology itself.

There was sort of a salvation-from-email feel around RSS awhile ago, but Marshall is onto something when he recently threw the zombie dust on it (the usual retort applies); and I’m a big nut for “enterprise RSS” from way back!

Fixing email, in the end, will be about dealing with email not as a legacy or misappropriated technology, but embracing it as vital and important. That is, we can’t get people out of using email, we can only help them use it better.

Disclosure: as mentioned, Spiceworks is a client, as is Microsoft.