by Nathan Burke on December 9, 2010
As the battle for the enterprise heats up between Microsoft and Google, it’s interesting to see the tone and tactics each company employs to influence public sentiment. While Microsoft takes the “Google Isn’t Enterprise Ready” tone, and not-so-subtly takes shots at Google in interviews, Google has a different stance. And today, as Google announced Google Message Continuity, it was as if Google said to Exchange junkies:
Hey, if you’re not interested in switching from Exchange to Google Apps for Business mail, that’s cool. But why not use Gmail as a backup copy? That way, if Exchange goes down, you’ve got a copy on Google, and all your users have to do is log in while you spend all day fixing your Exchange servers.
The service costs $25/user/year, and it’s an excellent way to get businesses to move to Google, even if they want to hang on to Exchange. From their blog post:
Google Message Continuity can also help organizations transition to Google Apps down the road. Since Microsoft® Exchange and Gmail are always in sync with one another, there’s no need to migrate email data when eventually deploying Google Apps. With Gmail, Calendar and Contacts available, users can get familiar with these cloud services without having to abruptly stop using their regular email system.
Google Message Continuity takes Gmail’s availability and extends it to Microsoft® Exchange users, delivering on the cloud’s promise of greater reliability and security for organizations of all sizes. And with research suggesting that on-premises email solutions often face regular email downtime, this extension just seems to make sense.
Ah, Google Message Continuity: The gateway drug to Google Apps for Business.
This is the second campaign from Google to influence the staunch Microsoft supporters to dip their toes in the Google cloud. Back in March, Google had a post positioning Google Apps as a Disaster Recovery solution:
Our goal is not to lose any data when it’s transferred from one data center to another, and to transfer your data so quickly that you don’t even know a data center experiences an interruption. Of course, no backup solution from us or anyone else is absolutely perfect, but we’ve invested a lot of effort to help make it second to none.
And it’s not just to preserve your Gmail accounts. You get the same level of data replication for all the other major applications in the Apps suite: Google Calendar, Google Docs, and Google Sites.
Some companies have adopted synchronous replication as well, but it is even more expensive than everything else we’ve mentioned. To backup 25GB of data with synchronous replication a business may easily pay from $150 to $500+ in storage and maintenance costs- and that’s per employee. That doesn’t even include the cost of the applications. The exact price depends on a number of factors such as the number of times the data is replicated and the choice of service provider.
At the low end a company might tier the number of times they replicate data, and at the high end they’ll make several copies of the data for everyone. We also replicate all the data multiple times, and the 25GB per employee for Gmail is backed up for free. Plus you get even more disk space for storage-intensive applications like Google Docs, Google Sites and Google Video for business. Other companies may offer cloud computing solutions as well, but don’t assume they backup your data in more than one data center.
Really clever, Google. Rather than engaging in a war of words, Google finds new ways to position themselves to break down cloud skeptics.
by Nathan Burke on December 9, 2010
The United States Department of Agriculture announced yesterday that they were moving 120,000 employees to email, Web conferencing and messaging systems by Microsoft, but Google claims they were not able to bid on the contract.
From the Reuters article:
The government agency, which oversees the U.S. farming, agriculture and food industries, said it had been working with Microsoft and Dell for the past six months on the project. The contract, worth $27 million over three years, is expected to save the USDA about $6 million per year once the switch to the cloud is complete.
Google, which claims its services save more money than Microsoft, and that its presence in a bidding situation usually means lower prices regardless of who wins, said it had no opportunity to formally bid on the contract at any point.
“We were not given the opportunity to bid for USDA’s business,” said a Google spokesman. “When there has been a full and open competition, customers have chosen Google Apps, and taxpayers are saving millions of dollars.”
The government agency, which oversees the U.S. farming, agriculture and food industries, said it had been working with Microsoft and Dell for the past six months on the project. The contract, worth $27 million over three years, is expected to save the USDA about $6 million per year once the switch to the cloud is complete.
Google, which claims its services save more money than Microsoft, and that its presence in a bidding situation usually means lower prices regardless of who wins, said it had no opportunity to formally bid on the contract at any point.
“We were not given the opportunity to bid for USDA’s business,” said a Google spokesman. “When there has been a full and open competition, customers have chosen Google Apps, and taxpayers are saving millions of dollars.”
by Nathan Burke on December 2, 2010
For the second day in a row, Senior Director of Microsoft Online Services Tom Rizzo has made news by claiming that Google Apps simply won’t work for the enterprise. On the heels of Google’s announcement that the US General Services Administration has decided to switch to Google Apps for mail, Rizzo had some strong words for Google.
From Microsoft’s Technet blog:
Recently, Google has added additional functionality to its productivity applications in an effort to bolster them. While it’s not clear to us how useful business customers will find applications such as Picasa Web Albums, Google Voice and Adwords, some of our customers don’t seem to be impressed with the value they receive from Google. Business such as WinWire, Bradshaw and Weil, Phaeton Automotive, Vinci and others have all been consistent in their message: Google cannot meet their requirements.
You have to meet the Height Requirement to Ride in the Enterprise
There’s no doubt that businesses are talking to Google, and hearing their pitch, but despite all the talk, Google can’t avoid the fact that often times they cannot meet basic requirements. For instance, in California, the state determined that Google couldn’t meet many of their basic requirements around functionality and security. Rather than address deficiencies in their product by developing a more robust set of productivity tools, Google cried foul instead of addressing these basic needs.
Constraints such as inadequate product support, failure to provide a roadmap, poor interoperability with other line of business applications and limited functionality are all reasons why public sector organizations such the State of Minnesota and New York City have said “no thanks” to what Google is offering.
and
It’s no secret that large public sector organizations have consistently valued Microsoft’s cloud offerings not only because of our deep understanding of enterprise organizations, but also for their ease of use, security and privacy capabilities. Regardless of how organizations are thinking about the cloud, Microsoft provides a choice for their productivity needs; on premises, in the cloud or as a hosted solution. Google does not offer any such choice.
So, is this simply a good PR tactic to get Microsoft coverage in the same conversations people are having about Google Apps even when Microsoft’s BPOS isn’t yet available?
Tagged as:
Microsoft vs. Google
by Nathan Burke on December 1, 2010
Whoa. Yesterday on ComputerWorld, Sharon Gaudin posted an interview with Microsoft’s senior director of Microsoft Online Services Tom Rizzo, and Rizzo pulls no punches in calling out Google.
From the article:
Are you saying Google doesn’t understand business? Yeah, Google doesn’t understand the commercial business. They get the consumer. A lot of times, consumers are more open in their privacy than a company…. We understand those things because we grew up in the enterprise. Google is akin to Microsoft maybe 20 years ago. The difference is we invested a lot in the space. Whereas, I don’t know if they’ll be here for the long haul. They’ve been in the enterprise e-mail and collaboration space for four years and they have less than 1% of the enterprise e-mail market after four years. And that’s according to Gartner.
Are you saying that Google is failing? I would say that they’re failing, yes. I would say that the results have not shown that they’re successful in the space. We’ve had customers who’ve gone to Google and have come back to Microsoft.
Ahem.
In an interview with us earlier this year, Google said Microsoft is too far behind in the cloud to ever catch up. What do you think about that statement? I would say we’ve been in the cloud a long time. We’ve been there since we did Hotmail — and that was like 1998 when we acquired Hotmail.
I can understand why Google would say that. They think we’re late to the game when we’re actually doing the right things to build a reliable service. We are committed long-term to this business. Google went and killed things like Wave. It was the second coming and now it’s gone. They also killed offline support. They said offline isn’t important because you’ll always be connected to the cloud. We’re big believers that not everyone has a high-speed Internet connection. Maybe they do in Mountain View [where Google's headquarters are located], but everywhere else offline is critical in any real business context. Google killed offline and didn’t even tell customers until they did it.
One more:
It’s interesting that Microsoft and Google each thinks the other is trailing It’s an interesting space to watch. Let Google say we’re way behind as we continue gobbling up enterprise customers. Let Google underestimate us. They’ll be shocked when they see all the momentum we have inside this space.
And those are just a few of the statements from the full interview in which Rizzo goes on to point the finger at Google for their privacy policy and StreetView. Rizzo goes on to say that Office 365 will ship in 2011 when it has been fully tested.
Tagged as:
Google Apps for the Enterprise,
Google vs. Microsoft