Visy Joins Rush to Reach for Cloud as it Replaces Microsoft Enterprise-Wide

PACKAGING giant Visy will migrate about 5000 users to Google Apps, the Internet giant's productivity suite, as it replaces Microsoft enterprise-wide.

Visy will join a cohort of four million businesses globally that have adopted Apps, according to Google Enterprise global vice-president Amit Singh.

Google Apps is a cloud-based productivity suite that includes Gmail, Docs and Calendar. Last week, the company showcased how Google Apps could even be accessed in offline mode.

Such products have long been the domain of Microsoft, where PowerPoint, Excel and Word were the de facto applications used by business for decades. But Google is slowly breaking that stranglehold with Apps.

Google Apps now has a worldwide user base of 40 million, up from 30 million a year ago.

"We've added about 10 million more users to the Apps platform," Mr Singh said on the sidelines of Salesforce.com's Dreamforce conference held in San Francisco last week.

The number of businesses connecting to Google Apps each day had increased by about 70 per cent. "A year ago, 3000 businesses would find Google Apps online and sign up," he said. "That's accelerating and 5000 businesses today do that on a daily basis."

Mr Singh said the number of business using Google Apps last year was three million, with companies in Asia and Europe jumping on the bandwagon.

"Visy Packaging is a really interesting use case," Mr Singh said, adding that Visy's replacement of the Microsoft stack was a common occurrence.

"We have people who move from the IBM Lotus platform, we have Microsoft and Novell. But the main one is Microsoft. A lot of small businesses that might have used Microsoft in the past are moving aggressively to the cloud and using our platform," Mr Singh added. "In Japan we have announced Softbank and Casio."

Locally, Visy joins the likes of real estate group Ray White and leading travel operator Flight Centre to ditch Microsoft for Google.

Visy is no stranger to the world of cloud computing. In 2009, it inked a five-year, $50 million contract with Telstra for cloud computing support of its critical business applications, including SAP. Google Enterprise global president Dave Girouard said it was a "great day" when Microsoft brought Office 365 to the cloud because "it validated everything that we were doing".

"Microsoft's a great company, but in the world of cloud computing we have a lot of advantages. "We have one email system (Gmail), we only have one version of the software," Mr Girouard said.

He said Google Apps's clientele was wide and varied, including everything from one-person companies to large enterprises.

Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt told attendees at Dreamforce that the company felt vindicated because its critics had previously doubted the viability of hosting applications in the cloud.

On stage with Salesforce.com chief Marc Benioff, Mr Schmidt said: "If you go back to the year before you guys (Salesforce) went public, you read the reports and (the) conventional wisdom was these were toy systems, that they were not going to be reliable, people would not store their information in the cloud. That was all wrong."

Cross Posted from: http://www.theaustralian.com.au