Google Enterprise EMEA VP: Enterprise is Google’s fourth pillar

I recently attended Google’s Enterprise Roundtable Event where I was fortunate enough to hear from the Vice President of EMEA Google Enterprise, Sebastien Marotte. Accompanying him were two existing organisations, Civcon and Extrabold, which have implemented Google Enterprise products helping them with business transformation, growth and improved productivity.

With over 10 000 companies signing up every day for Google Apps for Business, it’s easy to see why Enterprise is considered the fourth pillar of Google.

Marotte, who used to work for Hyperion (a company acquired by Oracle in 2007) provided a number of insights into Google Enterprise:

• Google Enterprise is one of the four pillars of Google
• Google Enterprise helps organisations make better decisions
• Google Enterprise is leveraging on the cloud and geolocation
• The internet giant wants to help organisations to build their own apps
• Google is also pushing Chromebooks very hard in the enterprise space
• Adoption of the cloud, mobile and social is really happening
• Employees are now connected via various devices and platforms

Google Apps is available for businesses at US$50 per user per year (or US$5 per user per month). That means if your company has 100 users, you can get above for as little as R45 000 on average per month. Now any IT specialist out there will tell that with Microsoft exchange one is limited when it comes mailbox size. This was one of the biggest drawbacks in the past before cloud solutions. With Google Apps, each user has a much bigger 25GB mailbox.

This means you have over 10 years retention not just on emails but whatever attachments were sent. According to Shane Symons from Civcon, “two years ago we had to choose whether to upgrade from MS Exchange 2007 – 2010, which would have cost us between 5 – 8 million rand. Luckily we chose Google Apps and saved”.

Using Google Drive is apparently part of Civcon’s company policy now, where all users has to save all files on the cloud storage service only. Symons reckons this has saved the company a lot of money and frustration.

The most important difference between the consumer market and enterprise market when it comes to Google Apps is security and added features that need to be in place to ensure data can be locked down and scalability is on par with the bigger organisations.

One of the market strategies, is the fact that educational institutes gets Google Apps for free. This means students that will form future government officials and business owners or employees will already be used to it and thus insist on having it implemented.