Head to head: T-Suite not too sweet for one

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.