Matthew Weinberger

September 19, 2011

2 Min Read
Google Gmail vs. Microsoft Exchange: Gartner Predictions

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Google Gmail is ready to take on Microsoft Exchange Online in the enterprise cloud market, despite only a 1 percent Google Gmail market share in overall business messaging, Gartner indicates. Those findings are based on Gmail’s increased momentum in organizations with more than 5,000 seats.

Matthew Cain, research vice president at Gartner, lays it out like this in a prepared statement:

“The road to its enterprise enlightenment has been long and bumpy, but Gmail should now be considered a mainstream cloud email supplier. While Gmail’s enterprise email market share currently hovers around 1 percent, it has close to half of the market for enterprise cloud email. While cloud email is still in its infancy, at 3 percent to 4 percent of the overall enterprise email market, we expect it to be a growth industry, reaching 20 percent of the market by year-end 2016, and 55 percent by year-end 2020.”

Where Microsoft Exchange and Google Gmail have prospered in the enterprise space, other solutions including IBM Lotus Notes/Domino and Novell GroupWise have lost momentum in the marketplace, according to the press release. Moreover, Cisco shuttered its business cloud e-mail solution, and VMware Zimbra is only now refocusing on the enterprise, according to Gartner.

But while Gmail is building out its solution’s broad enterprise appeal, as TalkinCloud has repeatedly pointed out, Gartner noted financial institutions and other organizations with strict and complex deployment requirements have found Google reluctant to add narrow-focused feature sets — especially less flashy upgrades that happen on the back end.

Regardless, Gartner reported, the cloud messaging market is continuing to mature, and competition between Microsoft and Google is healthy. I know there are plenty of cloud partners for both companies in the audience, and I’m very interested to hear what they have to say about Gartner’s conclusions — especially since Exchange Online is at the core of the Microsoft Office 365 suite.

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