About your point about Lotus Notes: I interned at IBM 3 times, and was never forced to use Lotus Notes. No one whom I worked with at IBM used Lotus Notes either. We used either Open Office or MS Office.
The most popular IBM software we used was SameTime for instance messaging and it was actually not bad at all.
The protected OS is de-privileged though. In order to protect a hardware virtualized hypervisor (i.e., one that also requires VT-x), they need to implement some sort of nested virtual machine.
I'm wondering by utilizing VT-x to implement the xmon module, whether this framework can be used to protect a hardware virtualized hypervisor (e.g., KVM) or not.
The most popular IBM software we used was SameTime for instance messaging and it was actually not bad at all.