I got this press release today from someone I really should learn to just ignore -- but I couldn't help myself. I actually read it. What struck me as the most odd set of statements in it focused on the idea that small and medium businesses are migrating away from Notes and into hosted exchange environments. In other words, that the move for small business into the cloud was somehow based on ISV's hosting off-site Microsoft Exchange mail servers for people.

I suppose there must be some out there. This one looked to me like the case of someone paying to have some code written for a single migration, and that code then being packaged as a product/service offering and backed with a very important sounding press release -- albeit one that makes many claims yet cites not a single source as the basis for any of those claims.

Am I totally off base here? It seems to me that what move there is from locally hosted messaging to cloud based is being driven by Google more than anyone else, with IBM's announcement of Lotus Notes Live and it's big Panasonic win showing they're working to be a serious player in the space as well. I can't think of a single site anywhere though, that's gone from having their own Domino server environment to using standard Exchange servers hosted by a service provider. Even Microsoft's play for the cloud space (Office Live) has very little to do with migrating to individual "pst" files and hosting them somewhere.

Is it me, or does this set off your bullshit alarm as well?

I'm not going to post a link to this guy's web site because, frankly, I don't want even that much association with him. My advice to anyone, is to listen to your own b.s. meter. If you're thinking of doing business with someone and you've seen them do things that seem a bit sketchy around the edges -- they'll probably treat you the same way.