Google Apps reaches one in five Aussie enterprises

Software as a service at one in three organisations.

Google’s cloud-based email, calendar and contact management products have become the second most popular collaboration tool among Australian enterprises after Microsoft Exchange, a survey has found.

A Telsyte survey of 330 Australian enterprises identified one in five as Google Apps users. More than 40 percent used Microsoft Exchange, which remained a “clear leader” in the market, analyst Rodney Gedda said.

Gedda noted that Google’s 5.5-year-old, business-grade Apps offering had overtaken more established competitors like Novell’s GroupWise and IBM’s Lotus Notes but would not disclose exact figures.

Last September, Gartner found Google’s Gmail in only one percent of global enterprises, which the analyst firm defined as businesses with more than 5000 seats.

Gartner found less than four percent of enterprises using cloud or hosted email solutions at the time. The firm expected that figure to grow to 20 percent by the end of 2016, and reach a majority by the end of 2020.

However, Telsyte’s Gedda found more than 30 percent of Australian enterprises consuming “groupware” — defined as email, calendar, contact and task management applications — under a cloud or hybrid model.

Those included organisations — like airline Qantas — that consumed a mix of on-premise, hosted or cloud versions of Microsoft’s Office 365 suite for security or legal reasons.

Only about 15 percent of the 330 enterprises surveyed consumed groupware through a pure software-as-a-service model.

Gedda suggested that Australian enterprises were more likely to move groupware, web serving, content management, intranet portals, storage, search and document management to the cloud.

Chief information officers and IT managers were less likely to look to consume back-office software as a service, including accounting, billing and customer relationship management applications, he said.