Google pushes email to businesses

GOOGLE PLANS to spiff up its web based email services as a wedge to get its online office applications into corporate accounts, Yahoo News reports.

It will add new email security features, acquired when it recently bought Postini for $625 million, and more than double the email storage capacity for each business user to 25GB.

Postini's existing user base of about 36,000 businesses employing more than 11 million individuals will be able to sign up for free trials of Google's office suite of online business applications through June 2008.

After the initial free trial period, Google hopes to retain many of those business customers with subscriptions expected to cost $50 per user annually. If the plan is successful, online software as a service could add over 5 percent to Google's $7.5 billion in annual revenue.

Google's free web based gmail service will remain limited to 3GB per user email storage. µ

L'INQ
Yahoo