When it comes to cloud-based e-mail, there are four major vendors vying for your IT dollars: Microsoft, Google, IBM and Cisco. Each has its pros and cons, but no matter which vendor you choose the price of e-mail will be roughly the same: $5 per user per month.
Google singlehandedly “repriced the business e-mail market” when it launched Google Apps Premier Edition in February 2007, with $50 annual subscriptions (or $4.17 monthly) that “undercut the market price for e-mail by a factor of two or three,” says a new report by Forrester Research analyst Ted Schadler.
Microsoft followed suit in late 2009 by lowering the price of hosted Exchange seats from $10 to $5 per month. IBM’s LotusLive e-mail and Cisco’s WebEx mail now offer similar pricing, in effect standardizing the whole market on price at about $5 per mailbox per month, with typically about 25GB of storage.
See full article at: Microsoft and Google fight over e-mail, but agree on $5 inboxes.
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