The launch of Google Apps Premier Edition last week has
been welcomed by IT chiefs as potentially offering a means of
delivering office productivity software at low cost.
But some CIOs and analysts have also said that it will need to
offer more than the attractive £26 per-user per-year charge to win
over enterprise users and present a viable alternative to
Microsoft.
Google's offering is a web-based office suite comprising e-mail,
word processor, spreadsheet, instant messaging, calendar and IP
telephony, plus 10Gbytes of online storage per user. It is free
from advertising and includes round-the-clock technical
support.
It also provides programming interfaces, plus links to
third-party single-sign-on and directory services software.
Robert Whiteside, Google Enterprise UK sales manager, said,
"Premier Edition is aimed at the largest to the smallest groups,
from the public sector to charities."
A key benefit, says Whiteside, is that Google Apps Premier
Edition does not require businesses to support the software
themselves.
However, Owen Williams, group head of IT at property firm Knight
Frank, said that Google's model to store users' data centrally
meant that "data security would need to be clearly understood".
Analyst group Forrester also expressed doubts about the level of
collaboration Google could offer. Principal analyst Erica Driver
said that, when compared with Microsoft Office, Google offered
limited team collaboration and lacked an equivalent to Microsoft's
Groove peer-to-peer software and its Onenote annotation tool.
Another factor, according to Ovum principal analyst David
Bradshaw, is that the service requires a live internet connection
to work.
"Google Apps lacks a detached client. It does not appear to
allow users to work when there is no connection," he said.
Bradshaw said that this could create additional costs for firms
looking to deploy Google Apps Premier Edition.
Carl Ricketts, former global CTO of Standard Chartered Bank,
said some IT directors looking at Google might want to consider
alternate routing of wide area network internet links. However,
Google's offering guarantees a 99.9% service availability.
Bob Tarzey, service director at analyst firm Quocirca, forecast
that within five years firms would favour on-demand tools.
Microsoft is also working on hosted software through its Office
and Windows Live products.
www.google.com/a/
Related article:
Google challenges Microsoft with business software
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