Google Juices Up Gmail

An online article by ComputerWorld reports that Google's share of the enterprise email market currently "hovers" at around 1 percent, but it will reach 10 percent within a few years, according to research firm Gartner.

Google is gaining ground with enterprises that have 5,000 or more seats, Gartner said, naming several public- and private-sector users with more than 10,000 Gmail seats.

Big organizations that use Gmail include Motorola Mobility, with 22,000 users; the US General Services Administration, with 17,000; the Los Angeles city government, with 17,000; automaker Jaguar Land Rover, with 15,000; the InterContinental hotel chain, with 25,000; and the Wyoming state government with 10,000.

Cloud-based email systems account for about 4 percent of the overall enterprise email market, according to the research firm.

Microsoft released a cloud-based Exchange service in 2010, and a more expansive cloud offering, Office 365, this year.

Google, meanwhile, has been making improvements to its platform "at a blistering pace," wrote Gartner analyst Matthew Cain, in the report, counting more than two dozen "substantial changes" to the platform in the past 12 months.

Those upgrades included improvements in security and manageability, Gartner said. For example, new security features include the ability to reset a user's sign-on cookies. And enhancements to the system's manageability include the ability to manage policy by user groups.

Microsoft's answer to Google's upgrade pace "is that it intends to add functionality to Exchange in the cloud before adding it to the on-premises version," Cain wrote. "This represents a major shift for Microsoft, and its actual execution has yet to be demonstrated."

Cain, in his report, cited a number of things Google has to do to win more enterprise businesses. Among other things, he said the company must deliver new features on schedule. Another obstacle for Google is a lack of transparency, which is a problem affecting the cloud in general, he said.

Google recently announced that 4 million businesses use its Google Apps software, and another 5,000 adopt it every day. The company didn't provide a breakdown on those businesses by size.

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