They're not friends and holding hands

Feb 5, 2008 19:36 GMT  ·  By

The title might seem a bit of a shocker, especially with all that's been going on as of late with Yahoo and Microsoft's bid, but in all respects, it is only a viable marketing idea that the Mountain View-based company has decided to monetize in order to expand its customer base. As easy as that, it attended to three of its competitors' email services.

There are three bundles of Postini security assets and today is the first day enterprises can acquire Google's merchandise, so there's no insight on the way it actually does the job it is supposed to. Nevertheless, it worked very well with Gmail ever since the Internet Giant bought the security company in September 2007, for $625 million. The three competitors addressed are IBM's Lotus Notes, Microsoft Exchange and Novell's GroupWise.

The pay is very low for all three bundles, with $3 per user per year for the Google Message Filtering, created to quash spam, viruses and other email threats. Google Message Security goes for $12 per user per year, and it takes care of the email leaks in which sensitive data is taken outside the firewall. The difference in price is based on the stronger virus detection, the outbound processing and content policy management.

The cherry of Google and Petrini's eyes is the Google Message discovery, priced at $25 per user per year and it has the ability to pinpoint individual emails for legal discovery in addition to all noted above. There's a package deal involved with this bundle, including one year of email archiving, retention and discovery.

"The vast majority of enterprise out there that have not deployed Gmail are using Exchange servers, Notes servers and GroupWise servers, etc., [and] now have the ability to deploy some fashion of Google Apps and make it work with their existing infrastructure," Scott Petry, the director of product management at Google and founder of Postini, told eWeek.com.