Microsoft: Google’s Got No Enterprise Messaging Game

In a strongly-worded blog entry, Sr. Director of Microsoft Exchange Product Management Julia White expounded on the benefits of on-premises messaging versus a cloud solution. But with a post title like “Make Google Talk Straight To You,” it’s not hard to imagine the angle White took on the debate. In a series of points addressing claims Google has made about the reliability of Gmail versus an on-premises Microsoft Exchange 2010, White isn’t afraid to get vicious when defending Exchange’s virtue.

First off, White affirms that email is mission critical at just about every enterprise either company does business with. But while Google likes to claim that they have the edge in reliability with its 99.984% uptime guarantee, White claims that on-premises Microsoft Exchange 2010 has up to 99.999% uptime, while Microsoft Exchange Online offers a 99.9% financially backed guarantee. She goes a step further, too, saying that Google is obfuscating statistics and should “stick to what they know, which clearly isn’t on premises email.”

Her second point has to do with Google’s feature release schedule, saying that users don’t want to be surprised, and yes, one week of notice qualifies as a “surprise.” The two Google Apps update tracks, she says, show that Google is attempting to understand the enterprise.

But with only that week of notice and some features skipping the try-out period and going straight to release – not to mention Google products that launched and then were pulled like Google Wave – mean that they’re a long way from reaching Exchange’s understanding of the foresight customers need.

Finally, White takes a few sentences to highlight the level of control the Microsoft Exchange access panel gives administrators.

At the time of writing, Google hadn’t yet responded to TalkinCloud’s request for comment. But Daniel Jefferies, Founder and President of Google Apps Authorized Reseller Newmind Group offered some rebuttal to White’s blog entry:

[UPDATE: For additional perspective and clarifications on Jefferies’ stance, see the comments below.]

• “Up to” 99.999% uptime is essentially meaningless, Jefferies says, with most of the on-premise Exchange customers they deal with reporting as few as three nines.
• As far as Exchange Online’s SLA, Jefferies claims that “planned” outages don’t count against that 99.9% figure. As long as Microsoft calls it “planned downtime,” they’re not on the hook legally speaking. That’s something Google Apps just doesn’t do, he says.
• None of Newmind Group’s 500 or so SMB customers have filed a single complaint about the feature release cycle, with many expressing delight at uncovering new functionalities in their business tools.
• Jefferies wasn’t all positive about Google Apps: it’s true that its administration console is somewhat lacking, for instance, and some changes like renaming document folders into “collections” were stultifying. But overall, he says that Google Apps has the major edge of just being simple and straightforward to use.

Without hard, scientific data on the uptime of Microsoft Exchange 2010 vs. Google Apps, this really does come down to a lot of “he said, she said.” But it’s clear that neither side is looking to back down any time soon.

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