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IBM announced yesterday that its Lotus Software division continued its momentum with an impressive 21 percent growth in the second quarter. This marks the 15th straight quarter where Lotus Software revenues have grown.

IBM attributed the growth to the success of Lotus Notes 8, Lotus Symphony, and key wins in the U.S. and emerging markets.

Emerging markets played an especially strong role with 18 percent of IBM's overall geographic revenue in the second quarter. This was fueled by huge growth in countries such as India, Brazil, Russia and China.

Some strategic wins included Russian Railways in Russia, Affin Bank and Trakando in Singapore, DL Cosco Shipyard in China and Aviva in India. Lotus also snagged its largest Asian customer ever with a 300,000 seat sale of Lotus Notes. This major bank invested in Lotus Notes as well as the free office suite of Lotus Symphony.

Lotus Symphony is being seen as a major catalyst for sales of other Lotus software. Symphony has already been downloaded over 1.3 million times since its release and the savings that a company can derive from using Symphony over Microsoft Office is significant. In fact, the Anglican Church of Australia announced that it will be saving approximately AU$150,000 a year simply by switching to Symphony.

Symphony wasn't the only spark however, as the company's other products prompted major sales as well. One of the top US accounting/consulting firms purchased over 150,000 seats of the entire Lotus portfolio including Lotus Notes, Lotus Connections, Lotus Quickr, Websphere Portal and Lotus Sametime. Lotus Sametime climbed over the 100 million licensed seats mark itself, with one-third of the sales going to Microsoft customers.

Lotus was definitely emphasizing the inroads it has made into Microsoft territory. Yesterday's press release stated that the Lotus software business "outgrew Microsoft by winning millions of customer seats worldwide in direct competition with Microsoft." They noted that many leading banks in the U.S., U.K. and Germany chose Lotus software over competing Microsoft product lines, as did the Australian government.

Lotus cited many companies reluctance to move to the latest versions of Microsoft products like Vista and Exchange due to the lock-in inherent in the MS platforms. This presented Lotus with the opportunities they needed to show their value and openness and win major businesses.

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