Google App Sync Guns For Microsoft Exchange

Google enterprise business is profitable and growing, said Girouard. Google Apps, he said, counts 1.75 million businesses as customers, for a total of 15 million users. Google is managing more than 4,000 TB of e-mail for its Google Apps users. And it has dozens of large customers with more than 1,000 employees, he said.

As for revenue, he was less specific: several hundred million dollars. He declined to clarify the percentage of customers using the paid Google Apps Premiere Edition. At the same time, he insisted that the free Google Apps, which is limited to 50 user accounts, isn't a "fremium" play, an attempt to convert users of the free service to the paid one. Ads, he said, help pay for the users of the free service.

There are three main reasons that companies switch to Google, said Girouard: radically lower cost, constant innovation, and happier end users.

In terms of cost, Girouard cited a Forrester Research report published in January that found Gmail was about three times less expensive than a hosted version of Microsoft Exchange. In terms of innovation, he cited 68 features added to Google Apps in 2008 and 49 so far in 2009. Happiness is a bit harder to quantify, but Girouard insisted that switching to Google leads to happier users.

"The vast majority of people that you move into Google from legacy systems feel really happy about it," insisted Girouard.

And for those who find happiness in Microsoft's products, there's now Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook. All of this might just sound like the argument Google has been making since 2004, were it not for customers like Avago's Rudy.

Rudy recounted a conversation he had with an Oracle executive that went something like this: "Get with the Google-Salesforce paradigm or I'm going to move off Oracle." Rudy, you see, is a fan of Google's ongoing software improvements.

Google Apps, said Girouard, "just gets better every week. ... That's very different from the classic IT world."

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