Why Enterprises Are Moving to Google Apps, Gmail

Though it started selling software to universities and small businesses, Google has pervaded more large businesses during the past year with Google Apps, the company's suite of messaging and productivity software. Analysts say Google Enterprise, the division of Google that runs Apps, has added many features to the product that make it more attractive to enterprise IT departments.

JohnsonDiversey, a company that sells commercial cleaning products, is Google's most recent win. It moved its 12,000 employees over to the premier edition of Google Apps, which includes Gmail, instant messaging, documents and spreadsheets (among other apps) for $50 per user per year.
"E-mail is critical to our work, but we're trying to simplify IT," says Brent Hoag, JohnsonDiversey's IT director. "We want less infrastructure to maintain, and Google [Gmail] allows us to do that."

Because Google hosts Google Apps in its own data centers, companies that buy the product do not need to maintain servers in-house (a process widely known as cloud computing or software as a service). According to Hoag, JohnsonDiversey had been managing several application servers and two different mail systems prior to moving to Gmail.

Google Apps has matured substantially during the past year with more enterprise features. Among them are the ability for IT groups to have greater control for what new features are rolled out to their users. Productivity applications, such as Google Docs & Spreadsheets, have also seen gradual improvements. Google baked in more advanced features, such as macros for spreadsheets. Google Apps also work better with BlackBerry e-mail, as it created a connector to BlackBerry Enterprise Server.

Perhaps most significantly, at a Google Apps CIO roundtable event in San Francisco this week, Google announced that enterprise users of Google Apps could access Gmail through an Outlook client. The company hopes it will quell the protests by users who have become tethered to the desktop app and who, as a result, have sometimes hindered enterprise adoption of Google Apps.

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