IBM to buy Chinese e-mail company assets

Correction, January 21, 9:14 a.m. PDT: An earlier version of this story incorrectly described the scope of IBM's acquisition. IBM is acquiring only certain assets of Outblaze.

Computing giant IBM has announced its intention to acquire assets from a Chinese e-mail and messaging company.

Hong Kong-based firm Outblaze sells hosted multilingual e-mail and messaging services for other service providers, telecommunications companies, and corporations to operate under their own brands.

Outblaze intellectual assets, including code and staff, will become part of IBM Lotus' Bluehouse project, IBM's online-business and social-networking and collaboration service, IBM announced on Thursday. Bluehouse is currently in open beta testing.

"The acquisition of these Outblaze assets further demonstrates Lotus' commitment to delivering secure, scalable online solutions, and will help accelerate delivery of collaborative services, with little to no IT involvement," Bob Picciano, the general manager of IBM Lotus Software, said in a statement.

Security experts warned that companies considering moving to hosted e-mail services in developing countries should think about where their data will reside, and choose their provider carefully. While Hong Kong is a highly developed autonomous region of China, a report last week warned that emerging markets such as China are at greater risk of cybercrime, while the U.S. government warned in November that the Chinese government was using advanced cyberespionage techniques.

"With any hosted service, you have to do due diligence, look at the system and how it's being managed," said Andy Buss, a senior analyst at Canalys.

Buss recommended that businesses either use a trusted local company or one of the trusted larger providers, such as IBM, for hosted messaging services. The analyst added that as more workers start to rely on online tools, companies have to work out how to integrate tools and work flows.

Tom Espiner of ZDNet UK reported from London.

[hackingbear]

Forget about the Chinese government, if your data is hosted in China, it may be stolen by rogue employees within a week.

[w_bee]

No matter where your data is hosted, some rogue employees may steal your data.
Your baseless accusation based on generalization is totally uncalled for.

[Mr. Dee]

w_bee, in China, your data does not belong to you, it belongs to the Government. So even if you are IBM hosting data for companies in China, the Government permitted to do whatever they see fit with it.

[forever4now]

China has more internet users than the US has population. Companies like IBM are probably ramping up their service portfolios to try to capture market share there.

[TuxedoBond]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Kong:

"Along with Macau, Hong Kong is one of the two special administrative regions and is not considered part of mainland China.[8] Under the "one country, two systems" policy, Hong Kong has a high degree of autonomy and is largely self-governing [9]. While China is a developing country and officially adopts socialist policies, Hong Kong retains its developed status and continues a highly capitalist economy.[9]"

[brian.lee]

"Forget about the Chinese government, if your data is hosted in China, it may be stolen by rogue employees within a week."

Just like when the American government called for search logs from major search engines and Google was the only one to say NO!