Google Apps Continues Push Into Enterprise: 30,000 New Users at Valeo
Today marks another step forward for Google in pushing its web office suite Google Apps into large enterprises. Valeo, a leading automotive supplier company, is deploying Google Apps to 30,000 of its employees.
Overall, business is good for Google Apps. Google noted in the annoucement that "more than a million businesses" are now using the Google Apps suite - which includes Gmail, shared calendaring, collaborative word processing and spreadheets, and private video sharing and websites (internal and external). As Google continues to tap into the enterprise market - competing against the desktop office software monolith Microsoft - deals like the Valeo one show that its web office suite can scale for large businesses.
Google noted that because Valeo has 30,000 Internet-connected employees, this is "one of the largest enterprise deployments of Google Apps to date." The deployment is being managed by Capgemini, a technology advisory firm that Google has partnered with since September 2007 for Google Apps deployments. This deployment will be across Valeo's distributed workforce of 192 business entities in 27 countries and five continents.
Google Apps launched its Premier package in February 2007, which bundled together Gmail, Google Talk, Google Calendar, Page Creator and Start Page, and (new to the suite at the time) Google Docs & Spreadsheets. The Google Apps Premier Edition went on sale at $50 per user account a year. The pricing and feature set have largely stayed the same since then, with the addition of video in September 2008. Another recent addition was significant too: a new tool for Google Apps that lets businesses sync the user account information in Google Apps with the business's LDAP user directory system. In other words, Google now syncs with Microsoft's Active Directory.
Google announced a reseller program for Apps in January, so it's clearly looking to scale up aggressively this year and onwards. In its promotions, Google is emphasizing the money and time savings that cloud computing enables. While there's no sign that Microsoft Office is in any big trouble yet, Redmond will be keeping a wary eye on Google Apps as it continues to shoulder its way into big businesses.
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I'm ecstatic to see the details finally public, having designed, delivered and demonstrated the proof of concept in a competitive tender back in 2007.
Congratulations to everyone at CapGemini, Google and Valeo for making it a reality!
Sam
I can't believe that Google is making headway selling Google Apps into the enterprise with two recent extended outages to Google Apps' email service. The Google Apps SLA is 99.9% availability, which is a bare minimum for small and medium enterprises, yet both these recent outages have exceeded even this SLA.
The poor availability of Google Apps is providing critics of cloud computing with plenty of ammunition. If Google paid as much attention on availability of their Google Apps service as they did their advertising money machine their subscribers would be better off.
I always recommend caveat emptor for anyone thinking of buying a cloud service: look for a provider with proven reliability and security; look for a provider with focus, is the service their core service or a sideline? (how many sideline products have cloud vendors shuttered in the current economic climate to focus on 'core business').
Google steal the headlines, but there are hundreds of cloud services vendors moving hundreds-of-thousands of end-users off on-premise solutions and into the cloud every month.
It is encouraging to see how the "cloud services" market is developing. Critics of such services are quick to voice concerns when there is downtime. But these problems must be taken in the context of the costs and maintenance burden of traditional enterprise software. In-house I.T. departments have failures in customer service too.
We think the cloud hosted enterprise applications story has a long way to run yet and that standards will continue to improve as the technology scales and develops further. That is why we developed our Domains for Apps offering specifically for small and medium enterprises @iwmn.
http://tr.im/liCV
Of course, this is a huge market to make profit from.
Would be interesting to see how Google goes from here. Frankly, I personally prefer the MS Office Suite.
Very interesting to follow, how much are the cost per user, some benchmarks can be very useful for us to have a better image.
I wonder if they really paid 30,000 x 50$ per year for email system. 1.5 Million USD for 1 year is crazy.
Hmmm. Page Creator was bundled. Does that mean that the Enterprise is also losing Page Creator and having to migrate to Google Sites, including the loss of JavaScript?
It seems Saas/Web services are getting adopted by small and micro companies or very large companies.
Whereas medium sized companies are lagging behind.
Small and micro companies as it is easy and low cost to operate.
Large companies can deploy applications worldwide without hassle.
Cloud is the future no doubt.
very good job on everything google knows not get a company to be in love every night I think google how such a system incredibly great
Google Apps for Enterprise is getting better and I think that Valeo's trust in them for their company office suite shows that it is a viable alternative. That doesn't mean it will be replacing Microsoft completely, but as companies start to move forward, they will begin to realize that enhancing collaboration is a key to achieving business goals, and Google Apps helps do this in ways that Microsoft can't. The future may not be all in the cloud, but part of it will definitely be there, and Google Apps for Enterprise won't be going away anytime soon. Now with Google Wave coming, it may even be getting better.
http://pressplaysolutions.com
personally prefer the MS Office Suite.
Value-added reseller Insight EMEA has joined the Google Apps’ reseller programme. Insight EMEA, which has operation in 15 countries across the region, will offer Google Apps online applications and services to its client base.
Both Insight and Google reckon that businesses of all sizes will embrace the software as a service (SaaS) delivery model.
Stuart Fenton, president at Insight EMEA, said: “Insight is a strong advocate of the SaaS model and we see this as an excellent opportunity to partner with a market leader in this space.
Technology goes beyond mere implementation and instead provides real business guidance on technology adoption and deployment.
Today marks another step forward for Google in pushing its web office suite Google Apps into large enterprises. Valeo, a leading automotive supplier company, is deploying Google Apps to 30,000 of its employees.
Overall, business is good for Google Apps. Google noted in the annouce that "more than a million businesses" are now using the Google Apps suite - which includes Gmail, shared calendaring, collaborative word processing and spread sheets, private video sharing and websites (internal and external)
Since Gmail launched in 2004 with, what was at the time, an unprecedented 1GB of storage per person, we've been focused on continuously improving the email experience with things like fast search to find messages quickly, mobile support , offline access and integrated IM, and voice and video
Google saw the opportunity to integrate Gmail and apps, like docs and calendar features, into the enterprise space and rolled out premier editions of Apps catering to the business community. Today, Google announced that it has struck a partnership.
Google said that international auto parts supplier Valeo will deploy Google Apps across its 30,000 member workforce. In a blog post , Laurent Guiraud, from Google's enterprise group, characterized the customer conversion as a vote for the efficiencies of cloud computing. "Today, more than a million businesses have moved beyond traditional
Google noted in the annoucement that "more than a million businesses" are now using the Google Apps suite - which includes Gmail, shared calendaring, collaborative word processing and spread sheets, private video sharing and websites (internal and external).
As Google continues to tap into the enterprise market - competing against the desktop office software monolith Microsoft - deals like the Valeo one show that its web office suite can scale for large businesses.
Google noted that because Valeo has 30,000 Internet-connected employees, this is "one of the largest enterprise deployments of Google Apps to date." The deployment is being managed by Capgemini, a technology advisory firm that Google has partnered with since September 2007 for Google Apps deployments.
This deployment will be across Valeo's distributed workforce of 192 business entities in 27 countries and five continents.
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.
Google released a plug-in for Microsoft Outlook that syncs email, calendars, and contacts to Google Apps for Your Domain. This tool will help bridge the gap between.
Silicon Valley rivalries between tech firms are serious. But they rarely break out into fistfights. Those of us who long for a rumble are forced to settle for cranky late-night blog spats.
Google saw the opportunity to integrate Gmail and apps, like docs and calendar features, into the enterprise space and rolled out premier editions of Apps catering to the business community. Today, Google announced that it has struck a partnership.