The Cloud vs. The Desktop: Google Launches Business Apps Suite

The skirmishes have concluded and now the battle is fully engaged on the Enterprise front. Google has launched Google Apps Premier Edition, a low cost suite of its applications aimed at the corporate office. The suite contains online e-mail, calendar, GoogleTalk, and the tandem of Google Docs (word processing) and Spreadsheets.

The Premier Edition is a subscription based service priced at $50 a year, (as opposed to being ad supported) and includes 10gig of storage and 24/7 telephone support and a 99.9% guarantee of uptime for Gmail. There are also application programming interfaces for data migration.

The same suite (minus some of the storage)is available for educators and is free. There is also a free Standard Edition that doesn’t include some of the Premier Edition features.

So mobile users, and others, now have a low cost “in the cloud” option, which makes a lot of sense for smaller devices on the go. So do small companies on a tight budget. Our small little not-for-profit theatre is now in the process of testing Google Calendar for our needs and given our constant budget battles, I bet the rest are not far behind.

via Information Week