Original Article: http://www.internetnews.com/software/article.php/3842131

LotusLive iNotes launch puts Big Blue in direct competition with Gmail and Google Apps Premier for cloud-based enterprise apps.

October 2, 2009
By Larry Barrett

October 2, 2009
By Larry Barrett: More stories by this author:

With its launch next week of LotusLive iNotes, IBM clearly believes it will become a legitimate threat to Google and its popular Apps Premier suite for enterprise customers that need low-cost, cloud-based business applications that — above all else — are reliable.

LotusLive iNotes, detailed on a relatively new IBM Web site, will cost $36 per user, compared to $50 a year for Google Apps Premier. However, it will only offer 1GB of storage per user versus 25GB for the Google application suite.

Analysts said IBM’s foray into the lightweight, cloud-based e-mail service doesn’t offer as many features and functions as Google’s offering, but the company could eventually pose a significant threat if it ever delivers the bells and whistles to match its reputation as the gold standard for computing services.

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“On the one hand, IBM is finally delivering something in this space and it should be applauded,” Gartner analyst Tom Austin toldInternetNews.com. “But the way I view it, it’s just an early down payment on a strategy that’s too late.”

Austin said that both Google and Microsoft, which will soon offer cloud-based version of its ubiquitous Office suite, have weaknesses that IBM could exploit to its advantage to maintain its installed Lotus Notes and Domino customer base. However, IBM’s sluggish reaction to the explosion in cloud-based applications may have left to big of a gap for it to close.

“It’s feature deficient,” Austin said. “The user interface is different from what [IBM] said it would look like. They said it would look like Notes and it sure as heck doesn’t. And where’s the meeting scheduling feature? It’s a personal calendar.”

Features aside, it’s clear IBM hopes to take advantage of the recent Gmail service outages that have inconvenienced users and raised questions as to whether Google is trying to do too much, too soon.

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For Fortune 500 companies looking to get their feet wet with cloud-based applications, IBM offers a familiar option. IBM hammers this home on its LotusLive iNotes, highlighting the service’s security, offline capability and cloud centralized calendar and contracts.

“This is a positive development for IBM and will keep the faithful happy,” Austin said. “But none of its competitors are going to run scared from this.

October 2, 2009
By Larry Barrett: More stories by this author:

With its launch next week of LotusLive iNotes, IBM clearly believes it will become a legitimate threat to Google and its popular Apps Premier suite for enterprise customers that need low-cost, cloud-based business applications that — above all else — are reliable.

LotusLive iNotes, detailed on a relatively new IBM Web site, will cost $36 per user, compared to $50 a year for Google Apps Premier. However, it will only offer 1GB of storage per user versus 25GB for the Google application suite.

Analysts said IBM’s foray into the lightweight, cloud-based e-mail service doesn’t offer as many features and functions as Google’s offering, but the company could eventually pose a significant threat if it ever delivers the bells and whistles to match its reputation as the gold standard for computing services.

RELATED ARTICLES

Google Apologizes for Latest Gmail Outage
Google Targets Notes, IBM Says ‘Bring it On’
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For more stories on this topic:

“On the one hand, IBM is finally delivering something in this space and it should be applauded,” Gartner analyst Tom Austin toldInternetNews.com. “But the way I view it, it’s just an early down payment on a strategy that’s too late.”

Austin said that both Google and Microsoft, which will soon offer cloud-based version of its ubiquitous Office suite, have weaknesses that IBM could exploit to its advantage to maintain its installed Lotus Notes and Domino customer base. However, IBM’s sluggish reaction to the explosion in cloud-based applications may have left to big of a gap for it to close.

“It’s feature deficient,” Austin said. “The user interface is different from what [IBM] said it would look like. They said it would look like Notes and it sure as heck doesn’t. And where’s the meeting scheduling feature? It’s a personal calendar.”

Features aside, it’s clear IBM hopes to take advantage of the recent Gmail service outages that have inconvenienced users and raised questions as to whether Google is trying to do too much, too soon.

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Can the x86 Just Keep Going?
Report: Chip Sales Rose Five Percent
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Windows Mobile Poised for Global Revival: Study
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For Fortune 500 companies looking to get their feet wet with cloud-based applications, IBM offers a familiar option. IBM hammers this home on its LotusLive iNotes, highlighting the service’s security, offline capability and cloud centralized calendar and contracts.

“This is a positive development for IBM and will keep the faithful happy,” Austin said. “But none of its competitors are going to run scared from this.”

“

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Microsoft’s Bing Now Has a Red-Light District
By Michelle Megna
June 15, 2009

Microsoft is aiming to weed out adult and pornographic images and video in its new Bing search engine by placing those results in a separate domain, explicit.bing.net — a move that could help it address critics’ concerns and simplify filtering.

The move is designed to make it easier for users to block explicit content, according to a blog post by Mike Nichols, Bing’s general manager at Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) .

“This is invisible to the end customer, but allows for filtering of that content by domain which makes it much easier for customers at all levels to block this content,” he said, adding that it would work regardless of what a user’s SafeSearch setting might be.

Bing’s SafeSearch tool is used to block potentially offensive or adult content, but depends on the user having it configured correctly. When in use, SafeSearch channels adult content through a separate domain that can be blocked at the server level, so Bing’s explicit domain should help IT staff ensure that porn isn’t showing up at the workplace.

“This makes it much easier for filtering software to block unwanted content if SafeSearch has been turned off,” Nichols said in the post.

In addition, Nichols said Bing will begin returning source URL information in the query string for images and video content, so that companies who already use this method of filtering will be able to catch explicit content on Bing along with everything else they are already blocking for their customers.

Microsoft’s enhancement comes following reports that Bing’s Smart Motion preview feature — which displays video clips when a user’s mouse hovers over a video search result — could be used to view pornographic video.

Smart Motion Previews actually predates Bing, and had been a feature of Live Search for more than a year. The preview clips displayed by Smart Motion Previews are typically less than a minute or so long, and they play automatically when a user hovers the mouse cursor over a screen image rather than redirecting users to a separate site with the content — making them a potential source of concern for users looking to block explicit content.

Porn issues aside, Bing’s big debut continues as Microsoft’s revamped search engine gains share in both the number of searches its handled and the number of and paid clicks its raked in during its first week, according to search engine marketing firm Efficient Frontier.

Microsoft realized a 18.9 percent lift in shares of impressions for the week Bing officially launched, compared to the prior week, while paid click share increased 8.1 percent, according to Efficient Frontier data.

With Bing, Microsoft has chosen to concentrate on four areas where it feels it has specific expertise — shopping, local, health and travel — in addition to general search capabilities. Searches in those categories deliver extra detail from crawled sites.

Bing’s promising early numbers come on the heels of other positive third-party reports. According to comScore, Bing in its first week increased Microsoft’s search engine market penetration 1.7 percent, from 13.8 percent in a five-day period in May to 15.5 percent during the period of June 2 through 6. On June 4, Bing was the second-place search engine worldwide, according to net metrics tracking firm StatCounter.

Those are promising statistics for Microsoft, which is aiming to unseat Yahoo (NASDAQ: YHOO) as No. 2 in search, where it currently lags a distant third, with industry-leader Google well out in front, with more than two-thirds of the market, according to April stats from comScore.

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For those of you using Google Apps Premium, here is the link to download Sync for Microsoft Outlook.

https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gappssync

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Google Pushes to Unseat Microsoft Exchange
By David Needle
June 9, 2009

SAN FRANCISCO — In its most direct assault on Microsoft’s business applications, Google unveiled Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook at a media event here. The new Apps Synch plug-in is designed to help companies move off of Microsoft’s Exchange server, to Google’s cloud service, with the option to maintain Outlook’s interface and features.

Apps Sync is available now, but only for users of Google’s (NASDAQ: GOOG) Google Apps Premier, a suite of cloud-based applications that costs $50 per user, per year, and to qualified education and nonprofit organizations.

The Apps Sync plug-in synchronizes e-mail, calendar and contacts data in either Outlook 2003 or 2007 with Google Apps. Google said a simple, two-click migration utility lets IT move user data from Exchange.

Google had some high profile customers on hand at the event, including biotech giantGenentech and chip maker Avago Technologies who have been using a test or beta version of the product.

Another customer, Morgans Hotel Group, said it recently switched from Exchange to Google Apps for all of its 1,700 users across different locations in the course of about a month. “We eliminated 16 servers that were at the end of their lifecycle and due to be replaced, so we saved money right away and there will be fewer to buy going forward,” Jason Harper, vice president of technology at Morgans Hotel Group, toldInternetNews.com.

Google surely wishes more big companies adopted for its Apps suite across the board, but more typically it’s being used by groups and divisions within an enterprise. “We don’t believe companies are going to get rid of (Microsoft) Office, it’s more nuanced than that. Office has its role,” said Dave Girouard, president of Google’s enterprise business. “Office has its role, and it’s a very great set of products for a set of things, but we think users ought to have more choice.”

Chris O’Connor, IT director at Genentech, said user response among his Outlook users has been positive. “Often times IT guys aren’t the most loved, but getting people to go ‘Wow’ makes my life easier,” he said. With Apps Sync, Outlook users gain more storage and, Google said, significant speed improvements.

Bob Rudy, CIO of Avago Technologies, a semiconductor spin-off of Agilent, said he’s satisfied with the security and reliability of Google’s cloud model. “It’s been vetted by our security intrusion folks and it’s a non-issue,” he said. “I believe in multi-tenant and scaling for the price advantage.”

He also said Google’s pace of delivering updates and improvements won him over. “The innovation cycle from Google, sometimes we see a couple of builds a week. That’s versus months and years it takes the enterprise vendor,” said Rudy. “It took Oracle two years to get us a Firefox implementation, that’s unbelievable.”

Outlook interface stays

Analyst Rebecca Wetteman said it was smart of Google to adopt the Outlook interface.

“I think Google recognized that part of the biggest hurdles for companies moving to Apps is that their staffs understand how Outlook works, they know how to use it and don’t want to switch to say Gmail and have to explain things like how the folders work differently,” Wetteman, analyst with Nucleus Research, told InternetNews.com.

Matthew Glotbach, director of enterprise product management at Google, agreed that one of the roadblocks Google has hit in trying to sell to enterprises is that typically a few senior executives and administrators love Outlook and “the only way you’re going to get them off it is to pry it from their hands.”

With Apps Sync, “our goal is to make it look exactly the same (as Outlook) to the user,” he told InternetNews.com.

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