Telstra is believed to have lost its first T-Suite customer to Google more than a year after the telco announced a cloud computing alliance with Microsoft.
Microsoft offers email, collaboration, conferencing and a host of other applications via T-Suite. Because the software is available online, users do not have to install any programs on their computers.
A Brisbane shipping firm now pays a little over $US200 a month for Google Docs, $US800 less compared with what Telstra was charging it to use the Microsoft products.
The client's spsokesman said the company was paying about $US1000 a month for 50 users as part of its T-Suite contract.
The company wanted an archiving solution but claimed to have been given the run around.
"First of all, they (Telstra) pointed us to Microsoft, which meant we had to go to a Microsoft reseller that sells (software) licences for a specific product to tag on to the product we'd already signed up for. "It was painful," the spokesman said.
Their spokesman said the company sought to expand its mobile workforce and Google's real-time collaboration product was "light years ahead of Microsoft". A Telstra spokesman said the defection was the first he was aware of.
Next: Microsoft partner HubOne vs Google partner Bluepoint
Nick Beaugeard, managing director, HubOne
First, our "mature" customers, either for regulatory or business process reasons, are asking for email archiving where they have a need for such a solution, but it's really simple to provide and implement with BPOS (Business Productivity Online Suite) and Office 365 (365 makes it even easier).
The credibility of the solution, the platform and the Microsoft Data Centres (a $US4.5 billion investment) means we are confident providing this as a solution over all others including on-premise.
We haven't yet lost any deals to other platforms because of issues with email, services or archiving, but we're a company across everything we can offer, not just individual solutions.
Email archiving has certainly helped us close deals and has never been a deal breaker (in our experience). Some customers have, however, preferred to stay on-premise until the benefits of Office 365 are realised, or for sovereignty issues, but these are in a minority.
In my opinion, when selling enterprise messaging and collaboration, nothing comes close to the user experience, performance and security that the Microsoft portfolio provides.
I believe customers looking for enterprise class messaging and collaboration need to look closely at Microsoft, their partner ecosystem and the wealth of solutions available for business needs.
Most end users are used to Outlook and Exchange. Going to BPOS delivers the same end-user experience they are used to and eliminates the requirement for any organisational change management.
I'm not going to comment directly about Google; we don't lose deals to them so I have little experience there. But we look at all the options and have chosen Microsoft's cloud vision to bet our business on.
Next: Craig McLaughlin, founder and operations manager, BluePoint
Craig McLaughlin, founder and operations manager, BluePoint
Mid to large enterprises have a requirement for email archiving largely for compliance reasons. So if they're interested in Google apps they are also generally interested in Google Message Discovery.
Smaller businesses are becoming more and more interested with archiving as it is now cost effective, easy to administer and doesn't require expensive hardware/software. This is now an entry point for them.
Message Discovery is tightly integrated - it's just an additional service and clients have a choice to retain their emails for one year or 10 years. And you can sync the users from your active directory environment or your LDAP server or what have you.
Whether we are picking up customers over archiving, it's probably not a direct reason for a win, it's probably just a bonus. The Gmail deals we're doing tend to be considered by the client as part a whole deployment.
Certainly organisations that are running Lotus IBM or Exchange in-house and have an archiving solution in place can't believe the low-cost of doing that in the cloud. So it's probably not a driver, but an add-on to the solution.
Google operates one of the most robust networks and distributed data centres in the world and that protection of data and intellectual property is a key priority. Google has been in the space for quite some time so they understand that security and integrity of the data has to be maintained.
Some customers in the financial sector may be more interested in the standards that the apps comply to than other customers are. But most clients understand it's still their data and Google is just hosting it for them, and if they've been considering a cloud solution they've probably already got over the security concerns.
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