FreshPhoneNews.com

Nokia has teamed up with IBM and will be bringing Lotus Notes support for S60 smartphones. The support will be available for select phones, and will start out with support for the Lotus Notes Traveler solution for 44 different handset models. According to Nokia, this will make the S60 accessible to   “140 million (licensed) Lotus Notes users”

Of course any savvy and avid user of the Lotus Notes technology will tell you that the licensed users’ count may be that high, but the number of active users is definitely lower. This isn’t grudged guess work either, according to research conducted earlier this year by Ferris Research, the enterprise email / PIM solution market in the US and Europe breaks down like this:

1.      Exchange: 65%

2.      Internal POP/IMAP: 15%

3.      Lotus Notes: 10%

If you add up the percentages, we still don’t know where the other 10% is, but from is obvious in these statistics, Lotus Notes has a pretty small share in the enterprise market, I mean really small. So Nokia’s wisdom stands questioned. The Finnish company’s S60 handsets are already have amazingly poor Exchange support, should there still be more time and resource investment into a least used enterprise solution? Nokia may get some new contracts because of this agreement, but it’s hardly going to be ripping apart the competition in the enterprise solution market.