IBM takes on Google with LotusLive iNotes

IBM on Monday announced the general availability of LotusLive iNotes, a cloud-based email, calendar and contact management service.

Word of IBM's iNotes move began to surface late on Thursday, and the company has had a LotusLive iNotes site live for days. The service is priced at US$36 a year per user, while rival software Google Apps Premier costs US$50 per user a year.

Sean Poulley, vice president of IBM's online collaboration and cloud services, said the idea behind LotusLive iNotes is to bring more security, reliability and privacy to enterprises that want web mail. "These things matter a lot to the customer," said Poulley, who described Google's Gmail as a "consumer-grade service". "We're bringing business-class services and support with mission-critical reliability at a price lower than the competition," he said.

See Google Apps for business, undercuts pricing and touts reliability at ZDNet Asia's sister site, ZDNet.com for more on this story.

This article was first published as a blog post on ZDNet.