No doubt irked by Microsoft's boasts about Notes-to-Exchange conversion last month, Big Blue has fired a salvo of facts and figures that it says point to a resurgence in its Notes/Domino business in the world's emerging markets.

IBM issued its retort after Kevin Turner, Microsoft COO, told financial analysts that his firm had sold 4.86 million SharePoint, Exchange and Office seats into Lotus Notes accounts in the last year. Over the next year it planned to win five million.

Although it was noticeably light on such stark numbers, IBM's statement said: "Led by strong sales of IBM Lotus Notes and Domino 8 in the second quarter of 2008, IBM's Lotus software business outgrew Microsoft by winning millions of customer seats worldwide in direct competition with Microsoft, aided by key wins over its Redmond-based rival in emerging markets."

It cited Lotus' largest Asian customer to date as "a major bank licensing 300,000 Lotus Notes seats as well as Lotus Symphony, IBM's free personal productivity software based on the OpenDocument Format". Unfortunately, it would seem that Asian bankers are as light-lipped as their Western counterparts about their IT infrastructures and IBM's press office were unable to actually name the customer.

The statement then name-checked a slew of new Notes accounts from around the world before embarking on some quite spectacular Microsoft-bashing.

"Many clients of all sizes are questioning their investments in legacy Microsoft software products," it said. "Migrating to new versions of Microsoft Exchange has proven to be a daunting and expensive task. Ferris Research recently published a report (Exchange 2007 Implementation Issues, December 2007) that indicated 70% of Microsoft customers felt that migrating to Exchange 2007 was either 'Difficult or Very Difficult'."

"Large companies are concerned with the prospect of upgrading to Microsoft's Vista operating system and continued high percentage of IT costs devoted to personal computers amid challenging economic conditions. Meanwhile, more strategic IT investments that could spur top-line revenue growth go unfunded and unrealised."

Quoting further favorable analyst reports and such hallowed Exchange-to-Notes converts as the Anglican Church of Australia, the statement pointed to 15 consecutive quarters of Domino/Notes revenue growth, 140 million licenses and usage by more than half of the largest 100 corporations in the world.

Whether such efforts in the propaganda war will make much difference remains to be seen. Most analysts would agree that SharePoint alone is one of the Redmond giant's fastest growing products ever. And if Microsoft's figures are to be believed, SharePoint is on track to become a US$1 billion business.