Microsoft’s response to Google Apps
Last month I wrote about the costs of outsourcing email versus hosting it in-house, and followed on to have a look at how Google offer very low-cost solutions for a basic web presence.
Microsoft are fighting back with their Office Live Small Business offering. They will let you host a website for you, provide you with hosted email and even give you a free domain (for the first year, or two years if it’s a .co.uk) if you sign up…for the low-low cost of €0 – for 1 year.
There is some small print, among which is the gem that you’ll be looking at ads in your email unless you want to pay to remove them – much like Google Apps, the collaboration tools don’t scale as cheaply as Google’s do and the webspace provided free is utterly hopeless compared to the big G’s offering, but this is still a respectably low-priced software-as-a-service product.
It’ll be interesting to see what sort of uptake they get.
Email as a Service & Do you need a website?
Outsourced email versus in-house
Arstechnica yesterday published a commentary on a Forrester report/paper researching the cost of in-house email systems compared to outsourced email solutions.
Conducted at the enterprise level, this report surveyed 53 end-user companies and 22 vendors as to the costs involved in their email, contacts and scheduling services.
The findings of the report are that for organisations that have less than 15,000 email users there are significant savings to be had in outsourcing email rather than hosting and supporting it in-house, and in the cases where Microsoft’s Exchange Online or Google Apps are used this threshold is higher.
Outsourcing wins
Microsoft’s Exchange Online came out ahead of all other solutions except Google Apps, who were significantly cheaper than Exchange Online again -
The two examples of actual cloud services, Microsoft’s Exchange Online and Google Apps for Business, came out significantly ahead. Exchange Online provided significantly lower costs until somewhere above 30,000 seats, while Google Apps’ monthly cost consistently came in at half the cost of others
Both of these solutions naturally have an inherent zero cost in terms of client licensing, in that the primary clients for both services are web browsers, although Exchange Online does mandate Internet Explorer for full Web Access functionality.
Google Apps comes out slightly ahead – in my opinion – in that it supports full IMAP/POP3 functionality, whereas Exchange Online requires Outlook 2007 and Microsoft’s proprietary messaging protocol. This difference is most likely not applicable in the majority of implementations however, as I can’t imagine many medium/large/enterprise scale organisations using anything other than Outlook in any case, as it is a class leader in terms of functionality and execution (Thunderbird is doing well, but it has a way to go yet). Both solutions support mobile devices (Google worked hard at making Blackberry users happy).
With regard to archiving and compliance implementations and costs, both Google and Microsoft naturally address these issues. Both solutions treat these functionalities as add-ons. Microsoft’s solution is through its Hosted Services, and Google’s is through its Message Discovery service.
Google occupies the low cost position
Google’s Apps Premier (business) Edition really is astonishingly cheap, even if its base price of €50/user per year doesn’t include archiving. Even when you do include archiving it still comes out cheaper than Microsoft’s solution which starts at $120/user per year.
For non-business users or sole traders who aren’t worried about the extra services available through Google Apps Premier Edition, Google Apps Standard Edition (free) has to be pretty much unbeatable on price and service if you want a custom email address.
Google also offers a solution for educational institutions and for registered non-profit organisations, which is essentially the same as the Standard Edition but is provided advertisement-free and with significant discounts for the archiving/compliance add-ons.
Register a domain through Google Apps at signup (it goes through GoDaddy), or register one separately and then sign up and forward the hosts MX records to Google’s mailservers, and you’ve got hosted email accessible anywhere that there’s an internet connection and through your favourite email client, all for the incredibly cheap cost of the domain name (.ie domains are a fantastic rip-off, though that’s hardly surprising when you look at the attitude in our government and the high levels of our private sector, particularly banking).
Which leads me nicely to the second – hopefully shorter – part of this post.
Do you need a website or a webpage?
A recent BusinessWeek article put forward the opinion that very many small- to medium-sized enterprises do not in fact need a website – they need a webpage, and cited a recent survey of small businesses (The author of the article didn’t link to the survey, and a light bit of Googling didn’t find it, so I’m assuming that he is representing it correctly. He’s also pretty offensive towards the common or garden variety of web programmer).
The finding of this survey is that at least 40% of small businesses – I’m assuming in the US – don’t have a website. There could be a few explanations for this such as low broadband penetration (not as big a factor as it was 5-10 years ago), cost of time taken from core revenue-generating/value-adding activities which are proportionally higher in an SME or simple reluctance to adopt new technologies, but the author suggests that it is because, for a lot of businesses, websites deliver a poor return on investment. I agree with him.
ROI is tricky
When a relatively simple website can cost several thousand of your local currency to design and code, and hosting and support fees can run into several hundred per year, it can be very hard to derive a return from websites which aren’t charging for content delivery or acting as a point of sale.
It would be crazy not to take advantage of the visibility which being accessible online can afford your business, but this can be accomplished with just one or two pages.
I haven’t got any figures to support this, but going on my own experience, quite a large proportion of websites are used simply as a means of providing contact information. When you get down to it, a simple description of the firm’s products or services, perhaps with a case study or example of service delivery or implementation is really all that is necessary for companies who cannot or will not implement e-commerce (as the author the BusinessWeek article alludes to, there’s no TCP/Gasoline delivery protocol yet).
Very low TCO
For a small business or a non-profit organisation, Google Apps offers a very viable solution for low-cost web presence through Google Sites. If you’re paying for Google Apps Premier, or using the Standard Edition, you get a certain amount of storage (hosting) space for Google Sites – 10 GB per Apps account, and the Premier edition gets another 500MB per user.
Using the simple but powerful WYSIWYG (you also have the ability to edit the HTML code behind it) editor in Google Sites it is quite easy to create a couple of simple but elegant webpages (Google’s example site shows the full potential…hardly necessary for what I’m describing) which summarise your business’ activities and products and provide contact information for potential customers.
Redirect the domain which you registered to get your Google Apps account to your Google Sites page using url masking/framing and your site is accessible at that address and you no longer have the ugly “sites.google.com/a/yourdomainname” url (I’m not entirely sure of the SEO implications of the framing/masking). For user’s of the Standard/Education edition, you’ve got hosted email services plus a website for the annual cost of registering a domain. Awesome.
Update: Check out Microsoft’s response to Google Apps – Microsoft Office Live Small Business (there’s a cumbersome name).
SQL as a service – Zoho CloudSQL
Zoho, the online application provider, has since the start of December 2008 been offering a new middleware layer called CloudSQL. Zoho, who are rivals to Google Docs and Microsoft’s Office Live, have taken the innovative step of providing an access layer to data hosted on their servers which takes requests in SQL form.
There is an existing API to access data residing/available in Zoho services which is HTTP based, but this new CloudSQL layer facilitates the access of that data using a language which is familiar to most developers who work with data access.
Essentially, this should allow developers whose organisations are already using Zoho’s services to access their Zoho-stored data using a language and syntax which they already know, making it much easier for them to integrate that data into their internal/external applications.
Currently CloudSQL is only usable with Zoho Reports, but it supports queries written in ANSI, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, IBM DB2, MySQL, PostgreSQL and Informix, and provides JDBC/ODBC driver support.
In addition to this, Zoho say that they intend to extend CloudSQL to allow access to other data sources. They seem to be the first-mover in this sphere, and if they could in fact gain recognition as a universal facilitator to online data they would have the potential to become as ubiquitous in cloud-based data access as Google are in higher level cloud access (outside of China, where Baidu still rule the roost).
The advent of a simple, common API for all cloud-data consuming services would be pretty awesome. It would of course also introduce a single point of failure.
Interestingly, Zoho’s Creator is, as of December 16th 2008, effectively a Google Apps IDE, as it has been integrated with the Google Apps Engine to allow deployment onto Google’s infrastructure.
