IBM taking on Gmail

In my last corporate job we had Lotus Notes as our email / group-ware platform.

It was good for some things but was very poor at things that Outlook express did very well. It was really the group-ware and the integration with work-flow systems that really saved it\’s bacon.

This was a few years ago now, I haven\’t seen the latest versions, but the news that IBM are now pitching iNotes, their online email client, to people disgruntled with the GMail service.

One of the issues pointed out as why IBM are choosing now to make their move is due to outages of the Gmail service.

For those people paying for Gmail as a corporate service, they have more reason to complain (unlike those of us who use it as a free service)

But this quote from an article made me think…hang on a bit

Last month millions of business users could not access email for almost two hours.

Wow, an outage of 2 hours in a month, that\’s about 2% of the working month, or in IT terms, an uptime of about 98%

With promised up-times quoted as over 99.5% for many online service this is obviously completely unacceptable! (Tongue firmly in cheek)

No one has mentioned whether this is a normal incident or a one off.

But come on, most computer networks have outages, I know that in that same corporate job, using IBM\’s notyes platform we had some very lengthy outages, some even more than 2 hours!

So what did we do? We did something else and waited for the network people to sort it out, which they always did.

Far too much jerking of knees I think.