Google’s Answer To Microsoft Office Gains Ground
Davis
I've heard my fair share of tech experts predict that Google Apps, Google's answer to Microsoft Office, is going to take over the business world.
To tell the truth, I didn't pay too much attention. It seemed impossible that anyone could move the entrenched Microsoft from its near monopoly on the office software market.
But things may have changed, at least if you believe The New York Times. A recent column asserted that Google “seems to be cutting into Microsoft's stronghold — businesses.”
To back up this assertion, the article's author, Quentin Hardy, cites Google Apps' recent “gets” in the enterprise space, including 80,000-employee Hoffman-La Roche.
I decided to do my own investigating, and found that there is increasing acceptance in Central Massachusetts and Greater Boston for Google's cloud-based office suite.
The Offering
For about $50 per year per user, Google offers the basic software most businesses use on a day-to-day basis, like a word processor, a spreadsheet program and email. All these programs are accessible a la “the cloud,” that business buzzword that refers to servers in the sky (or simply housed off-site). Because the programs are in the cloud, businesses that use Google Apps don't have to worry about installing the programs on their local computers. The users simply log into Google and access them.
One big user of Google Apps is the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester. The school just completed its migration to Google-based products in the fall. It started with student email last summer.
It sounds like a big move, but for Ellen Keohane, director of Holy Cross's information technology services, the shift toward the cloud just made sense.
“The first thing we considered was: Do we want to put Microsoft on site, or do we want to go to the cloud?” she said. “We felt that if we put in Microsoft on site, within 10 years we'd be having this discussion again.”
While the cost of Google Apps for for-profit businesses starts at $50 per year per user, nonprofits get the products for free. The only thing Holy Cross pays for is a service called Postini, which offers security and backups.
Yes, that's right. It's free. FREE. Kind of a no-brainer for those in the education field. That's why schools and colleges are hopping onboard quickly, and they likely make up a significant portion of the Google Apps customer base.
Holy Cross still has a license for its suite of business programs like Word and Excel, but Keohane reports that more and more students and staff are using Google's products because they're so easy to access from anywhere.
“I find myself using Microsoft Word less and less in my work,” she said. In particular, Keohane says Google Docs (the equivalent of Microsoft Word) makes collaborating much easier.
But it's not just schools using Google Apps. Private, for-profit businesses are, too. Like EPS Communications, a Woburn-based marketing firm, which has been paying the same basic rate to Google since it signed on in 2007.
And what if Google finally does up those rates?
“We'll pay it,” said Sean Leach, systems architect at EPS. “It works really, really well.” Leach said the firm has experienced a handful of minor hiccups that were resolved quickly, with little stress.
Allen Falcon, CEO of Cumulus Global in Westborough, has been a reseller of Google Apps for Business since 2007 and provides training and other implementation services for firms looking to make the switch.
“They're more open to the idea of cloud computing at this point,” he said.
Falcon also said he sees that his clients are more interested in tools that help their employees collaborate, and Google's suite of products can make that a lot easier and cut email clutter.
Of course, ask two IT people, and one will probably tell you that your data isn't going to be as secure in Google's cloud as it will be on a server stored in a closet in your office. Not surprisingly, Falcon has a retort to that, pointing out that the biggest risk to your data isn't necessarily a malevolent hacker.
“The greatest risk to a company's data are its own employees … and that's regardless of where your data's stored,” he said, adding Google Apps meets all the rules of the Federal Information Security Management Act and is being used by government agencies. “That's well beyond the level of security that most small- and mid-sized businesses have, never mind can afford,” he said.
To be fair, Microsoft still has a strong hold on businesses. IT research firm Gartner estimated in a May 2012 report that Microsoft has a comfortable 90-percent share of the 500-or-more-employee business segment. And it has launched its own cloud-based office suite: Office 365. Because most businesses and their employees are comfortable with Microsoft, it's conceivable that Office 365 will curtail Google's growth in the business sector.
The good news for businesses, of course, is that there is real competition brewing in the business software market, which should spur innovation and drive down prices. And anyone looking at an IT budget knows that lowered costs would be a welcome change.
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Got news for Digital Diva? Email Christina H. Davis at cdavis@wbjournal.com.
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