Mergers and acquisitions present a major pain point for disparate IT departments which have to consolidate data. For Docomo interTouch, which consolidated operations from five subsidiaries late last year, the answer was the cloud.
Darren Murphy, director of internal systems development at Docomo interTouch, said the hospitality technology provider decided to sign on with Google Apps, a subscription-based SaaS (software-as-a-service) bundle which includes e-mail, calendaring, and document management functions for its 1,100 employees.
Speaking to ZDNet Asia in an interview, Murphy said the initial proposal to go with Google raised some eyebrows with the executive board. "There was an initial negative reaction... People associate Google with their personal [Gmail] e-mail accounts," he said.
But the appeal of a hosted offering which took the load off the IT department tipped the scale in favor of the Google bundle, which the company compared against competing office productivity products from the likes of Microsoft and open source vendors, Murphy said.
"Our core business is not provisioning of e-mail and calendaring. We needed a plug-in solution," he added, estimating a saving of 30 to 60 percent over three years of the total cost of ownership.
"We don't need replicated servers because the infrastructure is taken care of," he said.
Other savings have come in the form of fewer support issues. Murphy said the IT department is less taxed to create internal sites because of tools within Google Apps which allow enterprise users to create and collaborate on documents.
He offered an example of the company needing to collect data on its call center quality testing: a document was created "in 10 minutes" with a form wizard which collated some 1,000 responses onto a spreadsheet. Traditionally, this operation would have "tied up a developer for half a day" in the creation of the Web form, he said.
Is the cloud truly ready for the enterprise?But the journey on the cloud so far has not been completely without its hitches.
Docomo interTouch was affected by the Gmail outage in August, which prevented some 10 percent of the company's workforce from accessing their e-mail for "half a day", said Murphy.
In July, Google App's document management platform, Google Docs, went down for an hour.
But Murphy isn't fazed. He said: "We don't have concrete plans to counter reliability issues... It's important to us that Google is a big name."
Southeast Asia head of sales Tan Bee Loon of the Google Enterprise division, pointed out that outages are not unique to the cloud. She reiterated Google's SLA (service level agreement) assurance of 99.9 percent uptime for paid Google Apps accounts. "Enterprises need a very deterministic SLA and support service, which Google Apps Premier Edition is able to provide," she said during the interview.
Nonetheless, businesses worried about having their data hosted outside of the company walls has presented a barrier for mass migration to the cloud. Industry commentators have forecast reliance on cloud computing to grow within enterprises, but this has not come without a measure of caution advised against handing data over to a third party.
Murphy said the company currently relies on a function within Gmail which provides e-mail archival up to 90 days, although it is considering lengthening this period.
Docomo interTouch's legal team is deliberating on the length of archival time regarding compliance issues, Murphy said. "They have agreed for now that 90 days is enough," he said.
Source: Victoria Ho, ZDNet Asia
http://www.zdnetasia.com/news/internet/0,39044908,62049389,00.htm
Friday, January 30, 2009
Thursday, January 8, 2009
Comparative Cost Analysis - Corporate
A comparative Cost Analysis
Executive Summary (This is a document excerpt from Forrester Report)
Executive Summary (This is a document excerpt from Forrester Report)
When Google launched Google Apps Premier Edition for $50 per user per year, it raised the question, "How much should we be paying for email?" But it's not just this eye-popping price that should trigger the question about where you should run your email. Instead, every time you have to upgrade, switch, or add users to your email system, you should examine your fully loaded costs and consider the delivery alternatives. This report presents a spreadsheet cost model to help you calculate your fully loaded on-premise email costs and compare it against cloud-based alternatives. Bottom line: Cloud-based email makes sense for companies or divisions as large as 15,000 users. And every company can benefit from occasional users or email filtering to a cloud-based provider.
Source: Forrester Research Report - http://www.forrester.com/go?docid=46302
by Ted Schadler, with Matthew Brown, Christopher Voce, Sara Burnes
Price comparison and TCO
A new report from Forrester presents a cost analysis of cloud-based email systems in enterprises, such as Google Apps or Yahoo!'s Zimbra. In the report, Forrester argues that cloud-based email services are cheaper than running email on-premise for all companies with less than 15,000 employees. What's more, Google Apps is significantly cheaper than both on-premise solutions and other cloud-based email services - even for very large enterprises. This could spell trouble for Microsoft, as we explain below. Source: by Richard MacManus
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/cloud-based_email_cheaper.php
Despite the cost benefits, at this point most companies (56%) are looking to implement a 'hybrid' model of on-premise and external email services. Just 19% plan to migrate their entire email base to a hosted or managed email provider.
Forrester's cost analysis (outlined in full in its report) shows that for the "Information Worker" segment, a large portion of many modern enterprises, cloud-based email is often cheaper. Forrester concluded that "cloud-based email is always cheaper for companies with fewer than 15,000 users".
The following chart of various options is interesting, because Google Apps comes out significantly cheaper than Microsoft Exchange Online - and other cloud based email options. Also interesting is that Microsoft Exchange Online Standard is about 10% cheaper than many cloud-based providers - due to its economies of scale no doubt. One wonders whether Microsoft will be forced to drastically reduce its pricing for Exchange Online, in order to compete better with Google Apps; although that of course comes at the risk of under-cutting one of the company's cash cows, Microsoft Office.
Source: Forrester; the above figures are based a scenario for 15,000 employees with email.
Even as the staff numbers increase, Google Apps remains by far the cheapest option. Of course there are other factors to consider other than price, but even so these figures are striking and are likely to be very pursuasive for many enterprises over the coming years.
Lastly, there are some interesting comments in the report about about the low price point of Google Apps. Google told Forrester that it "uses automation and massive scale to achieve an order of magnitude lower cost of service than a typical enterprise." This led Forrester to believe that "Google can make money at this price, and that the service will handle some firms' or users' needs well, including its bigger customers like Genentech and Avago Technologies."
However Forrester noted that it is unsure how much focus Google will give to the service. Also Forrester suggested that Google Apps still needs "better mobile support, an offline email and calendar client, and a clearer view of the product road map."
Note: Forrester released a companion report, entitled Should Your Email Live In The Cloud? An Infrastructure And Operations Analysis, that digs deeper into the technical issues around cloud-based email.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/cloud-based_email_cheaper.php
Wednesday, January 7, 2009
Video conferencing by Google
Video Conferencing by Google:
Hoping to make communicating online more personal, Google has added free video conferencing to its e-mail service, Gmail.
The offering, albeit basic, marks the Mountain View company's first foray into video conferencing, a product that can be used not only between friends and family, but also for business meetings.
Video conferencing online is far from a new idea. In fact, it is quite popular on eBay's Skype online telephone service.
But it does differentiate Google from the other major free e-mail providers, like Yahoo, which don't offer the feature. Additionally, Google is making the service available to companies that use its Apps bundle of online software, including corporate Gmail accounts.
Here's how Google's explanation about how to get started (small download, webcam and Gmail account required):
Open a Gmail chat window, click on the "Options" menu at the bottom, and choose "Add voice/video chat," which will walk you through a one-time installation of a free plug-in (a quick 2 MB download). hen you re-open Gmail you'll notice your "Options" link in your chat window has changed to "Video & more". Open this menu and click "Start video chat" to see and hear your partner in high-quality video. You can pop out the video and change its size and position, or switch to full screen.
Google's new product, to be rolled out over the next couple of days, is made possible through the company's acquisition last year of video conferencing software from Marratech and a licensing agreement with Vidyo, a New Jersey start-up. People without a webcam can use the service to chat by voice, an option that Google already offers through its Google Talk instant messaging service.
Google's video conferencing requires PCs with Windows XP or a more recent version, or an Intel-based Mac with Mac OS X v10.4 or later. Browser requirement are Google Chrome, Firefox 2.0+, Internet Explorer 7.0, and Safari 3.0.
Monday, January 5, 2009
Price Comparison- Hidden Cost
Complex Licensing: Hidden Costs in Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)
Google Apps for Enterprise is licensed in a straightforward per user/year manner. This means customers can easily understand and forecast how much they will be spending for providing communication and collaboration benefits to their users. It also means that if a company were to go through a reorganization or divestiture in the future, it can instantly scale back on these IT costs.
Analyzing the Google Offering
To provide a common ground upon which we can compare our offering to our main and biggest competitor we need to break down and regroup the Google Apps for Enterprise offering so it is clear what competing products the customer would need to buy to match the same functionality.
The Microsoft TCO
Let’s take a look at the Microsoft components:
E-mail and Calendar.
E-mail and calendar functionality is provided by Exchange (and Outlook as the client). Exchange licensing has two components: server price and client price. That is, companies must pay for the right to use the Exchange software in the server, and then pay an additional price for each employee that connects to that server. The bulk of the price is in this later connection fee, called a CAL. According to a study published my Microsoft the average cost of running Exchange is $3061 per user/year.
Antivirus and Antispam.
One key differentiation point for Gmail is that it already comes with antivirus and antispam protection. Almost all Exchange customers will supplement their deployment either with a Microsoft product, such as Antigen, or a third-party product that could cost $12 per user/year2. Also, the recently acquired Postini Message Security and Compliance solutions are included with Google Apps at no additiona
l charge.
See table beside for the cost in Microsoft solution.
Instant Messaging.
Microsoft’s Instant Messaging solution is called Office Communicator. It is licensed in a similar fashion as Exchange – with a server price and a CAL price. The software-only cost for this solution is about $253. This does not include any hardware acquisition or maintenance costs.
Documents and Spreadsheets.
This is the traditional Office client. The average price customers pay for their Office licenses is about $83 per user/year.
Sharing and Collaboration.
One of the greatest differentiators of Google Apps is the ability for users to easily share and collaborate with Google Docs and Spreadsheets and the recently added Google Sites solution. In the Microsoft world, to somewhat achieve that, customers need to buy SharePoint. But even then, SharePoint does not provide real-time multi-user collaboration, nor can it be accessed anywhere/anytime. SharePoint is also licensed under a server & CAL model. Most users would end-up paying about $20 per user/year to use SharePoint. This does not include any hardware acquisition or maintenance costs. The new Google Sites solution now provides greater collaboration capabilities that are similar to the SharePoint solution. Sites allows customers to share any type of content both inside and outside (if desired) the enterprise.
Storage costs.
Digital content being sent and shared in the form of e-mails and documents is exploding. The bad news is that for Microsoft customers, it is incredibly expensive to provide the amount of storage to keep up with this ever increasing demand. The Microsoft-sponsored study assumes a storage cost of $0.35/MB. Google Apps for Enterprise provides 25,000 MBs of email storage. Additionally, Google Sites provides 10,000 MBs of additional domain storage for shared documents PLUS an additional 500 MBs of storage per Google Apps user that can be utlized.
The Google TCO
While our licensing cost is only $50 per user/year there are costs associated with using the Google solution that are not reflected in that price. For example, while administration costs are significantly lower than for the Microsoft-comparable solution because of our hosted model. Customers must still dedicate someone to administer accounts, or to write and maintain the program that uses our API to do so. Other costs include migration, training, downtime costs.
In summary, the non-licensing costs of Google Apps for Enterprise are:
Source:
1 Microsoft Exchange 2003 Total Cost of Ownership. The Radicati Group. November 2003. This number is calculated by taking the 3-Year Average Messaging and Collaboration TCO per User/Year (in page 4), subtracting Storage cost per user, $10.50 (calculated separately) and then adding the Total Messaging Server Platform Cost (Hardware and OS) cost, divided by 3 (assuming 3 years) (page 13), $20.06.
2 Antigen Messaging Security Suite cost. Retails for $1.25 per user/month. Assuming 20% discount.
3 Based on Retail CAL cost of $31. Assuming 20% discount. Neglecting server cost since only a few may be needed even for a large install.
4 These are incurred in the first year only, for comparison purposes, they are spread over a 3-year period. This figure is based on Table 6 of the Radicati study – and taking only the “major upgrade” portion into account; assuming 1,675 hours to perform the initial migration.
5 Assuming same training costs.
To match the functionality that Google Apps for Enterprise provides, our competitors need to sell a myriad of products in complex licensing arrangements that take a specialist to understand and negotiate.
Most importantly, it also means two things:
Shelfware.
When companies do not fully understand the licensing options and complexities of the software they are buying, or when they are forced to buy the same program for everyone in their organization to attain a certain “discount level”, the company will most likely overpay and not fully utilize what they purchased.
Flexibility.
Our competitors require their customers to sign-up in advance for a specific number of users – for a number of years. If the customer underestimates the number of licenses they will use, then the vendor can penalize them with steep compliance fees. Conversely, if a company buys more licenses than what is ultimately used, then it has over invested in this solution and cannot recoup the overage from the vendor.
With Google Apps for Enterprise, customers do not face these problems since licensing is straightforward, there are no hidden costs, and if they ever need less or more licenses than what was originally purchased, we adjust pricing accordingly in real-time.
Most importantly, it also means two things:
Shelfware.
When companies do not fully understand the licensing options and complexities of the software they are buying, or when they are forced to buy the same program for everyone in their organization to attain a certain “discount level”, the company will most likely overpay and not fully utilize what they purchased.
Flexibility.
Our competitors require their customers to sign-up in advance for a specific number of users – for a number of years. If the customer underestimates the number of licenses they will use, then the vendor can penalize them with steep compliance fees. Conversely, if a company buys more licenses than what is ultimately used, then it has over invested in this solution and cannot recoup the overage from the vendor.
With Google Apps for Enterprise, customers do not face these problems since licensing is straightforward, there are no hidden costs, and if they ever need less or more licenses than what was originally purchased, we adjust pricing accordingly in real-time.
Analyzing the Google Offering
To provide a common ground upon which we can compare our offering to our main and biggest competitor we need to break down and regroup the Google Apps for Enterprise offering so it is clear what competing products the customer would need to buy to match the same functionality.
The Microsoft TCO
Let’s take a look at the Microsoft components:
E-mail and Calendar.
E-mail and calendar functionality is provided by Exchange (and Outlook as the client). Exchange licensing has two components: server price and client price. That is, companies must pay for the right to use the Exchange software in the server, and then pay an additional price for each employee that connects to that server. The bulk of the price is in this later connection fee, called a CAL. According to a study published my Microsoft the average cost of running Exchange is $3061 per user/year.
Antivirus and Antispam.
One key differentiation point for Gmail is that it already comes with antivirus and antispam protection. Almost all Exchange customers will supplement their deployment either with a Microsoft product, such as Antigen, or a third-party product that could cost $12 per user/year2. Also, the recently acquired Postini Message Security and Compliance solutions are included with Google Apps at no additiona
l charge.See table beside for the cost in Microsoft solution.
Instant Messaging.
Microsoft’s Instant Messaging solution is called Office Communicator. It is licensed in a similar fashion as Exchange – with a server price and a CAL price. The software-only cost for this solution is about $253. This does not include any hardware acquisition or maintenance costs.
Documents and Spreadsheets.
This is the traditional Office client. The average price customers pay for their Office licenses is about $83 per user/year.
Sharing and Collaboration.
One of the greatest differentiators of Google Apps is the ability for users to easily share and collaborate with Google Docs and Spreadsheets and the recently added Google Sites solution. In the Microsoft world, to somewhat achieve that, customers need to buy SharePoint. But even then, SharePoint does not provide real-time multi-user collaboration, nor can it be accessed anywhere/anytime. SharePoint is also licensed under a server & CAL model. Most users would end-up paying about $20 per user/year to use SharePoint. This does not include any hardware acquisition or maintenance costs. The new Google Sites solution now provides greater collaboration capabilities that are similar to the SharePoint solution. Sites allows customers to share any type of content both inside and outside (if desired) the enterprise.
Storage costs.
Digital content being sent and shared in the form of e-mails and documents is exploding. The bad news is that for Microsoft customers, it is incredibly expensive to provide the amount of storage to keep up with this ever increasing demand. The Microsoft-sponsored study assumes a storage cost of $0.35/MB. Google Apps for Enterprise provides 25,000 MBs of email storage. Additionally, Google Sites provides 10,000 MBs of additional domain storage for shared documents PLUS an additional 500 MBs of storage per Google Apps user that can be utlized.
The Google TCO
While our licensing cost is only $50 per user/year there are costs associated with using the Google solution that are not reflected in that price. For example, while administration costs are significantly lower than for the Microsoft-comparable solution because of our hosted model. Customers must still dedicate someone to administer accounts, or to write and maintain the program that uses our API to do so. Other costs include migration, training, downtime costs.
In summary, the non-licensing costs of Google Apps for Enterprise are:
Source:
1 Microsoft Exchange 2003 Total Cost of Ownership. The Radicati Group. November 2003. This number is calculated by taking the 3-Year Average Messaging and Collaboration TCO per User/Year (in page 4), subtracting Storage cost per user, $10.50 (calculated separately) and then adding the Total Messaging Server Platform Cost (Hardware and OS) cost, divided by 3 (assuming 3 years) (page 13), $20.06.
2 Antigen Messaging Security Suite cost. Retails for $1.25 per user/month. Assuming 20% discount.
3 Based on Retail CAL cost of $31. Assuming 20% discount. Neglecting server cost since only a few may be needed even for a large install.
4 These are incurred in the first year only, for comparison purposes, they are spread over a 3-year period. This figure is based on Table 6 of the Radicati study – and taking only the “major upgrade” portion into account; assuming 1,675 hours to perform the initial migration.
5 Assuming same training costs.
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