A year ago, GroupWise sold 1.2 million seats during the first quarter 1998, while Notes sold 2.7. Exchange edged ahead of rival Notes for the first time during the first quarter last year, selling 3.05 million Exchange licenses. Arnum speculates messaging sales may stay strong through the second quarter, but could trail off in the second half of the year. But large corporate resellers, such as CompuCom Systems, said they hope Y2K will continue to help their messaging business. CompuCom extended its messaging practice to include Lotus Notes six months ago.
Most customers are well down the road on dealing with mission-critical applications.
Lotus released Notes and Domino 5.0 just three weeks ago and officials there expect sales to pick up now. In the consumer space, EMMS tracked more than 118 million registered free Web-mail accounts. Yahoo reached an astonishing 47 million accounts, up from 5.1 million in the first quarter of 1998. Hotmail chalked up 40 million accounts, up from 14 million during the same period and up from 2.5 million in 1997. Arnum said almost 20 percent of all mailboxes run on a Microsoft platform, due, in large part, to the Hotmail acquisition in January 1998.