Will offer $20 bounty to each company switching from Lotus to hosted Exchange; offer counters similar IBM bid to attract Exchange customers.

Intermedia.NET, a provider of hosted Microsoft Exchange, yesterday launched a counter-offer following IBM Corporation's offer of a bounty for users migrating its Lotus software platform.

The company says that, where IBM offered $20 per seat, up to a maximum of 1000 seats, for migrations from Microsoft Exchange to Lotus Domino, Intermedia.NET will offer a flat $20 per company migrating from Lotus to Intermedia.NET's hosted Exchange service.

"Given the inherent attractiveness of Exchange and Outlook, we very frequently migrate Lotus customers over to our hosted Exchange service," said Michael Choupak, CEO of Intermedia.NET. "So while we have no need to offer financial incentives to migrate customers, we wanted to make a symbolic offer of $20 as a token to welcome Lotus users upgrading to Microsoft Exchange."