IBM Tuesday released the second beta of its Symphony rival suite to Microsoft Office, claiming that 88 percent of its users are Microsoft customers.
Symphony is now in a beta 2 release, with improved performance, access and ease of use, the company said. IBM also released some statistics about people who are downloading and theoretically using the software, which is a document-creation and editing suite based on OpenOffice.org.
Symphony is currently only available in English, but IBM said more than 50 per cent of Symphony users are outside of the U.S., including what it said is a “sizable” group of users in Brazil and France. The top 10 nations in terms of download are the U.S., France, Canada, Brazil, Japan, Germany, Spain, the Netherlands, India and Italy. About 12 per cent of Symphony users are deploying it on Linux, the company said.
IBM released Symphony in September as a free rival to Office and the company now claims that there are more than 250,000 users. The software is comprised of Lotus Symphony Documents, Lotus Symphony Spreadsheets and Lotus Symphony Presentations, a suite already included as part of Lotus Notes 8.
