IBM out-cheaps Google with web-based business email

IBM has launched a bare bones web-based email system for businesses, calculated to undercut Google's own popular offering. Big Blue's new LotusLive iNotes service starts at $36 annually per worker, compared to the $50 annually per worker that Google charges for its more comprehensive package. The service includes 1GB of …

[yogijp]

JP

Google free edition gives 7GB+ in Gmail and Calendar, Docs, Video and Sites. How does IBM out-cheap this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Also

IBM sells a "no-frills" fat client called Lotus Notes. Won't this cannibalize Notes sales? Oh wait, Notes is a "database application" not an email client.

[DavCrav]

@yogijp

"Google free edition gives 7GB+ in Gmail and Calendar, Docs, Video and Sites. How does IBM out-cheap this?"

I guess (although it's difficult to prove quickly) that GMail is for personal use only.

[Austin Modine]

Re: Also

You are confused by IBM's naming scheme. LotusLive Notes is a service that uses Lotus Notes to access a server with Lotus Domino e-mail. It's a re-branding of the service, Lotus Notes Hosted Messaging.

[Anonymous Coward]

Hum, lets do the math...

How many folks are going to use exactly a G? Only the North Korean Post Office has workers who need less than 1G space and they are going to use only a tiny fraction of that. Maybe 10M a year to get announcements about what their Dear Leader is up to at the weekend and how the steal production quotas are up 200% on last year. All gravy for Big Blue who cap their income at 10c a G per day stored at the price they are offering (Amazon will do you 12c a G per day retail and they are not making the hardware themselves) .

Doesn't google start out giving private punters a G email for free? Such punters and going to attract a lot more spam and bandwidth than the average North Korean postal worker...

[yogijp]

@DavCrav

"I guess (although it's difficult to prove quickly) that GMail is for personal use only."

Google Apps Standard Edition is free for businesses. Premier Edition is paid service, $50/user for 25GB mail and lots of other stuff.

http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/group/index.html

[Nick 6]

Business versus consumer

Some companies who would go for webmail from an established business services company but who might only view Google as a consumer grade novelty factory. The former will go for the IBM offering I guess.

[Nexox Enigma]

I'd believe the reliability claims...

I've seen Google screw up quite a few business mail accounts over the last few months, and they are rarely in a hurry to admit error or get things fixed. Google tends to come at problems with the web mindset that if something fails, it isn't that big of a deal, because there are always more servers out there. Unfortunately Google's mail servers will occasional go pear-shaped in such a way that the remote mail server won't cycle to the next MX record (no idea how big G pulls that off...) and incoming mail is dropped for a while. I've seen more than a couple arguments on support forums between a collection of users that share an MTA, and a Google support rep mostly telling them the problem is on the user end. The resolution, then, tends to be to switch MX records so that the faulty server is last or excluded, which indicates that the server is where the problem is.

Hopefully IBM will come at this with an enterprise software mindset, and actually behave as if email is an essential service.

[Anonymous Coward]

@Mathematically Challenged AC

I have over 10,000 unread emails in my Gmail account (no idea how many thousand I have read), and am only using 364Mb.

And as for Google Apps, I would have thought that you can get a similar cut down Lotus Symphony suite, supported by IBM for a relatively cheap price. And you can actually see where your business data is hosted....