The battle for your email in 2009

In my next few posts over the coming holiday period, I’m going to highlight some of the big themes that have been running through this blog over the past year, as well as flag up some important emerging trends that are going to be big in 2010. There are several stories I didn’t get the chance to write up, too, and I’m hoping to mention some of those in the course of the next few weeks.

Looking back, it’s obvious that one titanic struggle has loomed large over the SaaS and cloud landscape: the battle for your email. The year’s most highly trafficked blog post here was the story in March, Microsoft pumps cloud, trumps Google with GSK, when Microsoft Online Services revealed a 100,000-seat deployment by pharmaceuticals giant GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) of its hosted Exchange, Sharepoint and LiveMeeting service. Of course, any headline that mentions both Microsoft and Google is always going to attract a lot of traffic, but the icing on the cake here was some rombustious comments by Ron Markezich, corporate VP of Microsoft Online Services, about Google’s enterprise credentials, dismissing Google Apps as “a consumer service that’s not enterprise-ready.”

There’s no doubt that Google desperately wants to be taken seriously as an enterprise-class provider. The Google Enterprise team, whose product portfolio includes Google Apps and extends across the search appliance and a couple of other offerings, spare no expense to get the word out about their corporate wins. I was astonished a few months back to have a courier hand-deliver a press release the day Google announced a 35,000-seat roll-out of Google Apps at business services conglomerate Rentokil Initial. The box also contained a white mouse made out of candy, which, since it was lying on its side (see pic), I assumed was deliberately designed to represent a dead mouse (Rentokil is best known for pest control). My tweeted reaction inadvertently pushed the boundaries of good taste, incorrectly describing it as a “candied dead mouse,” which would have been totally gross.

Yet there’s still a question mark over whether Google is spending as much on actual investment in beefing up its Google Apps infrastructure as it is on promoting news of its customer wins. I know Google can point to its huge, seemingly infallible search and ad serving leviathans as living evidence of its planetary-scale infrastructure capabilities (in stark contrast to Microsoft’s recent 45-minute outage of its Bing search engine). But in a mirror-image of Microsoft’s Bing problems, Google is still learning the ropes with Gmail (this year’s fifth most trafficked post) and has not been immune to outages. On top of that, keeping the lights on is just part of the story when it comes to serving enterprise customers. They want account management, reporting and governance, and Google — along with the rest of the Web giants — still isn’t very good at personalized customer service.

There’s a tendency to see the battle for your email as a two-way fight between Microsoft and Google — between the established leader and the next-gen pretender — but Microsoft has played an accomplished defensive game by introducing its own hosted services, transforming itself into a cloud player and allowing customers to remain loyal to its existing products while benefitting from the SaaS model. You can see that as Microsoft taking the fight to Google’s turf — while Google’s introduction of a reseller channel was an astute strike at Microsoft — but both vendors are selling the cloud model…

Read the complete article @ Software as Services