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.