IBM Offers Corporate Email in the Clouds October 21, 2009
Corporate Email in the Cloud: IBM to Match Gmail with Own Offering
IT industry giant IBM went live on 10/5/09 with it’s own web-based corporate email offering - LotusLive iNotes - which will put it in direct competition with Google’s Gmail and all web-based email offerings from Microsoft including the online version of Outlook and the free Windows Live Hotmail program.
While Gmail and Windows Live Hotmail are free, IBM is charging a fee for it’s iNotes web-based email offering. Month-to-month fees will be $3.75 per user per month while prepaid accounts run $3/user/month. This Lotus Notes email system is clearly geared to the business user, unlike Gmail, which has enjoyed huge popularity since it’s launch in 2004.
iNotes offers 1 GB of storage per user, mobile device support, built-in spam filtering, built-in antivirus protection, around the clock monitoring, and administration tools. Prospective users can even sign up for a free 30-day trial before fully committing to iNotes.
Vendors are turning to the Internet in increasing numbers as a delivery platform for their apps, due to low-cost and administration capabilities. Another reason is the ease of access to these apps for the growing number of mobile device users.
Cloud Concerns
This push is not without concerns, however. One major concern being future transportability of data and usage to other similar software offerings. Will cloud-based apps allow for such data transfer or will users be essentially ‘locked-in’ to one vendor’s offering? How easily will today’s iNotes user be able to transfer all mail data to another application should they choose to switch at a later date. IT directors around the world should not take this point too lightly.
Other concerns center around outages and service interruptions. A recent Gmail glitch affected all Gmail users worldwide causing a considerable amount of frustration for a 24-hour period for millions of users. Granted, most of these users were of the personal nature, but imagine how an outage like this would affect companies on a global level should corporate adoption of these services become large-scale.
Summary
There is no question at this point that cloud computing is the wave of at least the near future. Along with green IT and virtualization, there are no hotter words or concepts on the IT front at the moment. And web-based…basically cloud-based…email usage is big so this offering from IBM is big news. And with a name behind it like IBM, the success of iNotes as a competitor of other web-based email offerings is nearly guaranteed and has a high probability of significant usage in the corporate IT world. How the above-mentioned concerns are addressed and whether these risks are realized as widespread usage unfolds remains to be seen.
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