5 reasons to move your company to Google

So, you’re sick of trying to keep Microsoft Exchange running in your company. Or maybe you’ve switched to Gmail for private use and are deciding whether it would suit your whole business. Whatever the reasons, you’ve probably at least considered whether a move to Gmail and its associated online applications might or might not make your business run better and smoother than ever. Here are a few reasons why over four million companies have moved to Gmail and Google Apps – and why a move to Gmail could be the best thing to happen to your business since Microsoft Excel.

See: 5 reasons not to move your company to Google

1: It’s easier to administer.

Your system administrator may have learned to live with Exchange, or even rapidly aging platforms like Lotus Notes or Novell Groupwise.

But that doesn’t mean they like them: days managing email in-house can be a nightmare of complex, everyday administrative tasks such as adding and deleting users, managing backups, restoring lost emails for frantic employees, dealing with spam outbreaks and DDoS attacks, and deleting users’ old mail to free up some headroom in space-limited mailboxes.

For most companies, Gmail represents a significant step forward from that. You still have to add and manage users, but Google takes care of the rest through a whitebox mail solution that can be branded with your own identity and logged into by users from anywhere.

A standard 25GB of space per user normally eclipses the meagre allotments – often measured in tens of megabytes – afforded users in many companies. Forget massive storage setups and ponderous nightly backups: email is continually backed up in the cloud and can be downloaded, using POP or IMAP3, if you absolutely must have a copy.

Spam is automatically intercepted, quarantined and deleted with pinpoint accuracy. User-defined rules can be used to filter and act on particular types of messages, attachments are automatically scanned for viruses, signatures and vacation responders can be set, and all emails are searchable in seconds thanks to Google’s built-in search engine.

In short, Gmail can not only replace your Exchange server, but also replace many of the third-party add-ons that you’ve had to purchase separately. Given its low price and generous design, it’s becoming harder and harder for most companies to deny Gmail’s excellent features-to-effort ratio.

2: It’s there when you need it

You may think your current messaging environment is pretty good, but if you’ve ever had a server outage you know how quickly airs of impenetrability can be shattered.

Talk to a Gmail user for even a little while, however, and they’re likely to tell you how much more reliable it is than their old messaging environment. Much-publicised outages may dampen the enthusiasm of many would-be Gmail adopters, but Google claims its overall availability this year has been on the order of 99.99%. Can your messaging environment deliver the same?

Ditto backup, which can be a hit-or-miss affair for the best of them but is built into the very fabric of Gmail and related applications. Google spreads its data across numerous data centres around the world, increasing its overall resilience and buffering it from the impact of any single outage anywhere in the world. Few companies can afford this level of redundancy, which means the success of backups is generally due more to a combination of planning and dumb luck.

On the whole, moving to Gmail means that your users will be able to get their messaging more consistently than ever, with nearly continuous uptime. This is not only important for its ability to save your application managers time and headaches – but it’s rapidly becoming a minimum requirement as users, spoilt by the high uptime of their personal Gmail, Windows Live and Yahoo! accounts, lose their tolerance for internal messaging systems that may or may not be up to the task when they need it most.

Over the page: Reasons 3, 4, and 5

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3: It’s extensible and accessible

Because it has become the gold standard in cloud email and productivity tools for businesses, Gmail is supported by a broad range of third-party apps and extensions: Sage's ACT! 2012 CRM tool, for one, was recently released with built-in support for Gmail, Google Contacts and Google Calendar. Google is continually adding new features and refining the Gmail interface, but if you need specific features it’s likely there’s a suitable plugin available through the Google Apps Marketplace.

For example, add-ons include links to hosted applications such as Xero accounting, FreshBooks invoicing, Salesforce.com, SurveyMonkey and MailChimp marketing, and many more; they tie into your Gmail and Google Apps environment to provide a fully-featured desktop that gives users quick access to their key business tools. The marketplace offers hundreds of apps in categories ranging from Accounting & Finance, Calendar & Scheduling and Productivity to Archiving & Discovery, Analytics and others.

Extra features aren’t the only benefits of Google's design: because Gmail it offers its own hosted Exchange-compatible server for external access, Gmail can be used from all sorts of devices: iPads, iPhones, Android phones and tablets, Web browsers, desktops and laptops of all stripes. Gmail, Apps, built-in features like instant messaging, voice and video chat – everything is broadly supported on nearly every platform, ensuring your users can get to them from any device, anywhere they happen to be. And that’s probably more than you can say for your current system.

4: It’s cheaper and cleaner

The irony of Gmail and Google Apps is that, while they're an alternative to Exchange, they're accessible for free on an individual basis (with limitations) or at a flat rate of $50 per employee, per year. Factor in the savings from avoiding the cost of licenses for Microsoft Exchange and other servers, as well as the costs of acquiring and managing supporting hardware, and you're up for a much cheaper solution that will give you fewer headaches in the process.

Savings obviously vary from company to company, but Google offers an [xref: http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/messaging_value.html|indicative calculator]] for the ROI benefits of switching to Apps. Take it with a grain of salt, but its suggestion is that a 20-employee deployment will cost $13,196 over three years compared with $121,187 for a three-year Exchange deployment. That's significant bottom-line savings.

A move to cloud-hosted solutions also offers benefits for companies that have made a corporate commitment to cleaner, low-carbon alternatives. Google recently spruiked the green credentials of its service on its company blog pointing to findings of a study by the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) and Verdantix that reinforced the idea that cloud services are far more energy-efficient than the inhouse systems they replace.

The Google analysis (PDF) found conventional small-business deployments use around 70kWh of power per user, per year, with economies of scale reducing this to 4.7kWh per user in large rollouts. A hosted Gmail solution, by contrast, consumes around 0.22kWh per user. Again, these results will vary in practice – but with carbon pricing on its way in 2012, reducing running costs is going to be high on everybody's IT agendas.

5: You're not alone

. Gmail long suffered a reputation as a personal email service rather than an application platform, but Google has been ramping up its Australian presence this year and engaged a number of providers to work with small businesses keen to adopt its services.

Partners including CSC, Cloud Sherpas, Cognizant, Opera Solutions, Razorfish, SADA Systems and TempusNova are official members of Google's Cloud Transformation Program, which links customers with third-party integrators who can provide technical support and integration support, just like a conventional value-added reseller (VAR) would do with conventional solutions.

This network of partners has as its mission statement the conversion of business into cloud users and offers both ongoing support and technical advice on integration with Google services that help bridge the gap between inhouse systems and Google's own cloud-hosted environment.

"The program supports a complete transition to the cloud through products including Google App Engine, AppScript, Sites and more," Cloud Sherpas wrote in a blog post about the appointment.