At just $50 a year per user, Google Inc.’s Google Apps Premier Edition (GAPE) hosted office productivity suite could be one of the cheapest mistakes a large business makes.
That’s one of the conclusions of a study by the Burton Group, which said GAPE offers lots of good value for business users, but lacks strong regulatory compliance features and poor administrative tools for user accounts. That means a quick deployment in a large business could be a “career-limiting move” for IT staffers who advocate its use without knowing of its shortcomings.
In his 55-page study, Guy Creese, an analyst at the Midvale, Utah-based analyst firm, said that GAPE has energized the market for software-as-a-service (SaaS) products. But it is primarily based on a similar free, consumer-focused Google Apps productivity suite that doesn’t convert easily for large corporate use.
“Initially combining a portal, e-mail, instant messaging, calendars, document sharing and concurrent document creation — all for the price of $50 per user per year — the solution rapidly caught enterprises’ imaginations,” Creese wrote. “Unfortunately, quickly adopting GAPE without understanding its quirks or looking at other alternatives is likely to become a career-limiting move.”