LotusLive iNotes will feature hosted, on-demand e-mail, calendar and contact management. Price per user: $3  per month,  a few bucks cheaper than Google Apps Premier Edition, which has a pricetag of $50 per user per year.

IBM’s pitch: With web-based e-mail, all  employees get real-time e-mail access from a Web browser and Web connection. And you get IBM’s reputation for security too boot.

As web-based interface, LotusLive  e-mail accounts are enabled with POP, authenticated SMTP and IMAP capabilities for use with e-mail clients such as Lotus Notes or Microsoft’s Outlook.

For companies looking to save money by moving to Software as a Service (SaaS) and having someone host their e-mail, this new offering will serve as good competition to both Google and Microsoft Exchange.

IBM’s assuring customers of both security and privacy for their e-mail accounts — and they’re putting their name behind the offering.

While nobody expects LotusLive iNotes to be a game changer, the entry of IBM into the hosted e-mail service business promises to keep other forces in the marketplace on their toes.

A new study from no less than the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and powerhouse IBM finds that workers who maintain online connections to their bosses produce more than those who don’t.

The surprise finding: Not only were people who frequently communicated online with their manager more productive, but those who avoided their managers online were much less productive.

The researchers (two of them from MIT’s Sloan School of Management) analyzed a wide range of electronic communication channels, including e-mail, buddy lists and social networking activity of 2,600 workers over 12 months to come up with their conclusions.

Employees who maintained constant electronic communications averaged an increase in revenue of $588 per month over the average; the luddites who didn’t produced $98 per month less than the average.

The researchers concluded that the under-performers probably felt pulled in too many directions with no clear leadership or direction.

As the modern workforce becomes more geographically dispersed it’s become a challenge for workers and managers to stay connected and know each other’s strengths and weaknesses.

Using electronic tools to forge stronger bonds and communicate tasks, objectives and feedback seems to be a key way for companies to keep everyone connected and productive.

To read the details of the MIT/IBM study, visit here.

Chambers recently told a gathering at the RSA security conference that the computing industry’s move to sell pay-as-you-go computing cycles available as a service on the Internet was also “a security nightmare.”

Speaking during a keynote address at the annual security fest, Chambers said that cloud computing was inevitable, but that it will have a big effect on the way networks are secured. “You’ll have no idea what’s in the corporate data center,” he said. “That is exciting to me as a network player. Boy am I going to sell a lot of stuff to tie that together.”

However, he added, “It is a security nightmare and it can’t be handled in traditional ways.”

Big computing companies like Cisco and IBM are actually hot on the concept, but security experts see a lot of work ahead.

“I think it’s really going to be a focal point of a lot of our work in the cyber security area,” said Ronald Rivest, a MIT computer science professor and noted cryptographer speaking during a conference panel at the confab. “Cloud computing sounds so sweet and wonderful and safe… we should just be aware of the terminology, if we go around for a week calling it swamp computing I think you might have the right mindset.”

Rivest added that he was optimistic about cloud computing’s future, but that it was going to take “a lot of hard work” to make it secure.