LotusLive iNotes: Like Gmail, but Without the Outages
by John Paczkowski
Posted on October 2, 2009 at 5:01 AM PT
As launch dates go, the timing could not be better. Less than a week after Google’s Gmail suffered its fourth service disruption this year, IBM debuted a competing Web mail service intended to undercut it. Called LotusLive iNotes it’s an email, calendaring, and contact management system aimed squarely at the enterprise space Google has been so diligently courting.
Priced at about $36 per user per year, iNotes is cheaper than Google’s (GOOG) Apps Premier Edition offering, which costs about $50 per user per year. And while it might not offer as many bells and whistles (IBM’s 1GB of storage is significantly less than the 25GB that Google provides), IBM (IBM) claims it more than makes up for it in security, reliability and privacy.
“We run the world’s most mission critical systems for banks, telcos and utilities,” said Sean Poulley, IBM’s vice president of online collaboration services. “It’s fair to say we’re pretty trusted….Candidly, Google has shown itself to be weak….There is a world of difference between supporting a consumer-grade service and a business-grade service. We’re bringing business class services and support with mission critical reliability at a price lower than the competition.”
Comments
I wish them luck. But IBM, and Lotus before them have almost always provided too little too late to come out on top of these things.
Every two years or so IBM announces that they are abandoning Windows with varying degrees of certainty. Of course until the last until the last IBM customer abandons Windows too, they have to spend a lot of time on compatibility issues, resulting in IBM remaining one of Microsoft’s larger corporate customers.
The more competitors Microsoft has the better though in my book. Funny though, I don’t actually see any indication of specific OS or browser requirements to use this. I guess that means it works with everything right?
Posted by Mac Beach at October 3rd, 2009 at 7:19 pm