October 5, 2009 By Matt Williams
IBM announced Monday, Oct. 5, the debut of LotusLive iNotes, a Web-based e-mail and calendar service that company officials say costs $3 per month for each user.
With the announcement, IBM became the latest company to jump into the growing hosted e-mail market, which also includes products like Google Apps and Microsoft Office Live. IBM's LotusLive is a cloud-based suite of applications that includes instant messaging, file sharing and meeting services. These types of solutions allow users to access them via an Internet browser.
Sean Poulley, the vice president of IBM cloud collaboration services, said Monday that the aggressive pricing coupled with the company's expertise in managing mission-critical systems is what separates IBM's new e-mail service from its competitors.
"It's understandable that much of the government sector has a high desire and focus on security and reliability, and those are the stock and trade of the IBM company," he told Government Technology. IBM has a significant presence in the federal sector, which could mean there's an opportunity to bring iNotes to that market segment.
It remains to be seen if governments will choose en masse to move their on-premise e-mail systems to solutions where the data and software is stored in an online "cloud" hosted and managed by private vendors. Washington, D.C., is thought to be the largest government so far to adopt Google Apps, although most of the district's employees reportedly have chosen to continue using on-premise Microsoft Outlook even though Google's Gmail offering is available to them.
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