Phase 2 International, an SaaS provider has partnered with IBM to provide “Lotus On-Demand,” a suite of enterprise products, consisting of Lotus Notes (enterprise email messaging), Lotus Sametime (secure instant messaging), Lotus Quickr (document sharing), and Lotus Connections (corporate social network).
The software is meant for small to medium sized businesses and is priced solely on monthly usage. Included with the monthly charges are data migration, customization, training, and customer support. The software seems to represent IBM’s strategy to reach out to SMBs through SaaS. The software, which is engineered to allow businesses to reduce overhead and overall costs.
The suite seems to be pretty cost-effective for SMBs. Lotus Notes is priced at $12.99 per user per month. Lotus Quickr is $12.99 per user per month. Lotus Connections costs $2.99 per user per month. All three products include Lotus Sametime. Phase 2 offers volume pricing when a company has over 1,000 users, or if people decide to bundle two or more products. They say they don’t have a pre-defined price if someone were to subscribe to the entire suite yet, but there would be a significant discount.
PHASE 2 also hosts other high-end applications for SMBs including Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft Project, Microsoft Live Communicator, and applications for CRM, accounting and HR. In light of the current recession, SMBs should find Phase 2’s SaaS pricing appealing.