Google Apps is now an Exchange-replacement

I've always thought of Google Apps as a product that's trying to replace Microsoft Office with a simpler, cheaper, web-based solution.

However, on Tuesday Google unveiled Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook, a new plug-in that allows Premier customers to access their Google Apps mail, calendar and contacts using Microsoft Outlook, while also being able to have full web access to all of their data over the web just like any other Google Apps customer.

This move changes the game. It pits Google Apps against Microsoft Exchange, the business world's most popular email groupware platform. And, in many ways this makes a lot more sense for Google and allows the company to play to its strengths in building internet-scale back-end systems.

The challenge, of course, is uptime. In 2009 alone, Google has already had several highly-publicised outages of Gmail, which some companies are already using as their primary messaging system. Google promises at least 99.9 per cent uptime for its Premium customers or else it will refund them the cost of the service. Nevertheless, it's a leap of faith for an organisation to turn over it's back-end services to Google.

It's clear that Google is making a strategic bet on winning over business customers. Besides the new Outlook plug-in, Google has recently added a number of business-oriented features to its messaging platform, including:

|> Offline Gmail
|> LDAP directory synchronisation
|> BlackBerry BES interoperability

For the companies that take the leap of faith with Google, cost is usually the primary motivator. Google charges its Premium customers US$50 per user per year. Even hosted Exchange plans cost about US$500 per month plus about US$6 per user per month. For a smaller company with just 100 users that would make the cost of Google Apps Premium US$5000/year vs. US$13,200/year for the hosted Exchange solution. And an in-house Exchange solution will typically have a total cost of ownership (TCO) that is even higher than the hosted solution.

For a look at the new Outlook feature in action, check out this video demo from Google: