Gregg Eldred

From CIO.com:

One customer that's made the leap (to hosted e-mail) is Ingersoll Rand, a $13 billion industrial company with 60,000 employees that makes everything from golf carts (Club Car) to air conditioners (Trane). According to John Kalka, Ingersoll Rand's VP of technology deployment, the opportunity to move to a cloud-based e-mail arose in 2007, when the company was deciding whether or not to renew its contract with IBM for Lotus Notes.

Ingersoll Rand was running the e-mail system in-house. It had also developed many custom apps on the Lotus Domino server, but the cost was taking its toll, Kalka says. After looking at the on-premise, traditional version of Exchange, Kalka says "the numbers didn't look much better."

Then Microsoft approached him about online version of Exchange. Kalka saw the cheap per user price. Coupled with the fact he didn't need to manage hardware, he decided to sign up.

"That big e-mail cost went away," he says. "We had e-mail servers all around the world. 95 percent are shut down or re-allocated for something else."

A couple of read throughs of the article, and nothing is said of the Lotus applications. I am only guessing, but I would imagine that Ingersoll Rand still has Lotus Notes for the custom applications. And that some of those re-allocated servers are being used to put the Lotus applications closer to the users.

The rest of the article talks about Sharepoint Online Services and the seriousness of Microsoft's efforts with the cloud. Interesting reading.

Link: CIO.com: Hosted E-Mail's a Hit, But How Far Will Microsoft Go with Cloud?

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