IBM launches cloud-based productivity suite

Dave Bailey, Computing, Friday 2 October 2009 at 10:25:00

LotusLive iNotes lightweight cloud email system jostles with Google Apps

Services giant IBM has launched a competitor to Google Apps, the search
giant's cloud-based productivity package.

Called LotusLive
iNotes, the service will go live next week in what is a direct challenge to
Google, whose service has been the subject of outages over the past year.

The service will cost $36 (�22) per user per year.

One factor in IBM's favour is that it has vastly more experience dealing with
businesses than Google. The latter is often perceived as offering consumer-type
services with revenue generation mostly through advertisement placement.

Google Apps Premier costs $50 (�33) per user per year, gives users 25GB of
storage and a 99.9 per cent uptime guarantee, equivalent to a minute and half
per day, 44 minutes per month or nearly nine hours a year in downtime. However,
Google recently bit into its service level agreement with two outages in
September.

Full story at http://www.computing.co.uk/computing/news/2250495/ibm-launches-google-apps-killer