Google Apps is a favorite tool of many web workers, but soon it might be just as well-known to many of our cubicle-bound corporate colleagues. That’s because Google is making great strides into the enterprise, taking on the likes of Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes/Domino with the enterprise version of the product.
With its recent earnings statement, Google noted that growth in its enterprise business was accelerating. That acceleration includes some recent large wins with enterprise customers for Google Apps — with some big names in the bunch, including Jaguar Landrover (15,000 users), Rentokil Initial (35,000 users), Motorola’s handset division (20,000 users) and Konica Minolta (7,000 users), adding to some large customers reported earlier this year.
Google Apps is making inroads into the government sector, too, with the New Mexico Attorney General’s Office and the City of Orlando recent switchers to Google Apps (from Lotus Notes and Microsoft Exchange, respectively).
If you’re already a Google Apps user, having it more widespread in the enterprise could mean easier collaboration and less fiddly exporting/importing of large documents and emailing them to colleagues and clients, which should be welcome news for many web workers. It should also be good news for corporate web workers who are often on the road and perhaps working from a few different machines.
However, although Google Apps is a good product and competitively priced, I suspect Google will find it hard to keep its growth in the enterprise sector accelerating like this, as it will be difficult to persuade many organizations to switch from their existing deeply entrenched Exchange- or Notes-based installations. Many large businesses have systems that rely on Exchange or Notes to function, and I can imagine that many conservative corporate IT departments would be deeply uncomfortable with the idea of their data residing on Google’s servers rather than their own.
Do you use enterprise Google Apps in your business?
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