Making Sense of the Messaging and Collaboration Market: Q&A: David Scult, a general manager in Microsoft’s Information Worker Division, discusses market shares and trends in the messaging and collaboration arena.

A timely pre-Lotusphere reality check; see the full release for more details

PressPass: This week, IBM claimed that Lotus Notes is taking market share from Microsoft. Is that happening?

Scult: IBM’s claims are not consistent with the market trends we – and a number of independent third-parties – are seeing. Just yesterday, Gartner refuted IBM’s claims in a Computerworld article titled “Au contraire: Exchange's lead over Notes actually 'getting bigger and bigger,' says Gartner.”

And according to a Ferris Research survey of 917 organizations worldwide, Exchange has a 65 percent share of the messaging market, while Notes/Domino has a 10 percent share.

Ferris’s findings are consistent with Gartner’s lead e-mail analyst, Matt Cain, who publicly stated last year, “We forecast that Microsoft will get 70 percent of the commercial e-mail market by 2010.”

PressPass: Is it true that 50 percent of the Fortune 100 companies use Lotus Notes?

Scult: Lotus Notes was once in at least 67 percent of the Fortune 100 companies, so in that context, 50 percent now isn’t terribly impressive. But, yes, the figure is likely true. Because of the proprietary code in some Lotus Notes databases, some customers keep Lotus Notes around for these legacy applications, but they don’t use it as their primary messaging or collaboration applications. So, technically, these customers may be using both IBM and Microsoft platforms, but in reality 80 percent of most of the Fortune 100 have moved or are moving to Microsoft Exchange as their primary messaging application and SharePoint for their primary collaboration needs.

Making Sense of the Messaging and Collaboration Market: Q&A: David Scult, a general manager in Microsoft’s Information Worker Division, discusses market shares and trends in the messaging and collaboration arena.