IBM goes after Web-based e-mail market

Jake Widman
Saturday, 03 October 2009 01:39

Your IT - Home IT

IBM is challenging Google with a new business-oriented hosted e-mail service. LotusLive iNotes costs only US$3 per user per month, less than three-quarters of what the comparable (albeit more functional) Google service costs.

The new iNotes service is part of IBM's LotusLive portfolio of online collaboration services, which include tools for sharing desktops and presenting slides, taking polls, sending instant messages, and a lot more.

iNotes adds Web-based calendaring and e-mail to the roster, services previously only available through the Lotus Notes service, which starts at $9 per month.

The service also includes a gigabyte of storage, with more available as an option.

At $36 per user per year, iNotes comes in significantly cheaper than Google Apps Premium Edition, Google's business-oriented hosted application suite, which costs $50 per user per year.

It's also significantly less functional, since in addition to calendaring and e-mail, Google Apps includes Google Talk and Google Docs & Spreadsheets, in addition to 10 GB of storage per user.

The IBM offering also competes with Microsoft's Exchange Online Deskless Worker service, which provides e-mail and calendaring for $2 per user per month but only 500 MB of storage; and standard Exchange Online, which provides 5 GB of storage and a 25GB mailbox but costs $10 per user per year.

IBM, of course, has plenty of experience selling into the business services market.