Rackspace Email vs Google Apps

Rackspace is known first of all as the top Amazon competitor on the Cloud Computing platforms market (Amazon Web Services vs Rackspace Cloud). But while Amazon continues developing its IaaS niche (Infrastructure for third-party web services), Rackspace decided to create its own Web services for the enterprise market. In May they launched Rackspace Email - hosted email server, and today they released Rackspace Cloud Drive - the enterprise file collaboration solution. Interesting that Rackspace also provides hosted Exchange and Sharepoint (that compete with its own services), but positions the own apps between the cheap but possible less robust Google Apps and the top-shelf Microsoft options.

We continue our series about how Microsoft doesn't like Google. At this time - the remake of the old TV series Moonlighting with Bruce Willis and Cybill Shepherd, starring Google as Bruce Willis. It's not just funny movie about Google Apps, but also a good opportunity to practice your English (if you need). And we hope that Google will fire back with its own quirky advert.

While the deal between Google and General Motors is still unpublic, Google has officially signed another large Google Apps customer - the largest Spanish banking group BBVA. BBVA plans to implement Google Apps for 110 thousand employees in 26 countries up to the end of 2012. Thus, Google has updated its personal SaaS record (in terms of project volume). It's interesting that BBVA moves to Google Apps from Microsoft Exchange (so Office 365 loses again). Besides, this deal will be a huge step forward for Google and for the whole SaaS industry because it's the largest SaaS project in the banking sector. After all, we all know how carefully banks  protect their commercial data. See also the Top 5 largest SaaS projects.

According to the latest insider information, GM is already about to move from their current collaboration system Lotus Notes to Google Apps. It's about 100 thousand seats. At first this information appeared earlier this month - when the Wall Street Journal reported that Google and General Motors signed a preliminary agreement according to which GM will test Google Apps and Google has to meet some additional requirements. But GM haven't made the official statement yet. If all goes well, then Google will update its personal record on the SaaS project size. So far, the largest Google Apps customer is Valeo - 30 thousand users. And of course, it's a big victory for the SaaS market. But it's not clear yet what additional requirements GM presented to Google. Won't Google transform the service in favor of big business and make it less usable for small business?

One advantage of Google's main advantages over Facebook is that the search giant can perfectly integrate businesses and individual users (clients) in the single network (Google +). And if it succeed, Google+ will become the successful platform for advertising, unlike Facebook, which hasn't achieved the significant progress in the advertising incomes yet. The first big step in this direction has been done by Google today: from now Google Apps Now users can log in to Google+ under their corporate accounts and use Google+ for business needs. First, Google+ can serve as a social layer via creation of business/project groups (circles) with employee profiles. Second, it can be used as an intranet microblogging system for discussions and file sharing (like Chatter, Yammer ...). Third, it allows to search and support customers via Google+. But of course, the killer Google+ for business is its video chat app Google Hangouts.

Google Apps for Business gets a new interesting feature - the read (i.e. open) notification. It works this way: you send a message and if you don't receive the reply for a long time, you can open the message and check whether the recepient has read it or not. The notification can be enabled by Google Apps account admin for all users and works only for internal communications (within the domain). Thus, you can make internal collaboration more strict and possibly more effective. Because employee, that sends an important task via email can control its reception and if necessary can call the recipient and ask to check the mail.

During the last 2 weeks Google has almost made another revolution on the Web. No one expected that in the near future someone will be able to break the social monopoly of Facebook, but it looks like Google will succeed at this time. And because today in order to be successful, any business should be a part of the Social Web, then, want-or-not you have to sort out how to use Google+. Fortunately, there is still enough time, because the network is now working in a half-closed mode (registration is by invitation only). Additionally, the key business features will appear only in the second half of the year. But meanwhile you can get used to them:

It wasn't so easy to create a list of the largest SaaS projects. Because though SaaS vendors would like to promote themselves, they often have no clearance from customer to go public on their deployments. Sometimes, when a dispute on the largest projects starts, they claim that they have a customer with XXX users, but don't tell what customer and provide no proof. Therefore, our rating is based on unverified information. However, it is interesting that neither Salesforce nor Google Apps are included in it. And four out of five deployments - are talent management (or human capital - HRM) systems: