SaaS: Former Google Partner Embraces Microsoft BPOS Migrations
Cloud migration specialist Binary Tree claims to have more than 5,000 customers and 20,000,000 users under its belt between itself and its partners. So when the company says its abandoning its Lotus Notes/Domino-to-Google Apps migration business in favor of an exclusive focus on Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint, and BPOS cloud solutions, it’s worth taking a closer look. Here’s the story.
So why cut ties with Google and its partner program entirely? In a guest blog post at the Microsoft Online Services Team Blog, Binary Tree co-CEO Henry Bestritsky lays out the case against Google Apps. To wit, his blog post opens like so:
“We have announced our decision to stop marketing our CMT for Google Apps email migration product and are retiring from the Google Enterprise Partner program after months of market evaluation, customer feedback and an overwhelming global demand for BPOS migrations versus Google Apps.”
So why the low demand for the Google Apps productivity suite? Bestritsky says it comes down to lack of user familiarity with the product, a shorter functionality list, and, most notably, serious security concerns. In European markets, especially, Bestritsky says customers are complaining that Google Apps just doesn’t comply with legally-mandated security standards.
The part that really made The VAR Guy do a double-take, though, is that Bertrisky alleges that Google’s incremental and automatically added feature upgrades to the Apps suite leave a lot of customers in the lurch – he says that customers feel like they’re never sure what exactly they’re buying with a Google Apps deployment, and the search giant likes to play it mysterious.
I have to admit, I never thought of it that way. As a personal user, it’s a nice surprise when Google Apps updates with things like Priority Inbox. But as a large enterprise, I can see how never being sure about what your suite will look like the next day could be a turn-off.
And large enterprises do seem to be Binary Tree’s bread-and-butter, with companies like Dow Chemical and Coca-Cola Enterprises as named clients. But The VAR Guy has a hunch that if Binary Tree worked more in the SMB space, the BPOS/Exchange/SharePoint vs. Google Apps decision would be a lot harder.
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I agree with you about the SMB comment. Its a moving target though and both are struggling, for different reasons, to engage fully with the channel and therefore create the wave that is expected at SMB. My money (literally) is on Google to win that one. The benefits gained by going Google as SMB far outweigh the pain of a migration. Not so if you’re a corporate Microsoft user.
However in this case there could be one other reason for the Binary Trees defection………….Google have a very good Lotus migration product already and its free. Always difficult to compete with the vendor, especially when its free!
Steve: True, it’s difficult to compete with free. But on the flip side, if free was so easy every vendor would have a free offer…
-TVG
While I have been reading more from the channel who has been put off by Microsoft with their BPOS strategy , I have not heard as much from Google resellers, maybe that’s just because it’s so new. HyperOffice hopes to recruit visionary VARs who are targeting SMBs and are looking for alternatives to Google amp; Microsoft. While we have had resellers for a few years now, we officially kicked off our recruiting efforts in Q4. Excuse the plug Matt, but I’ve been meaning to update your readers of a new site we’ve put up at http://partners.hyperoffice.com
Can anyone confirm that MS is no longer letting VARs reseller BPOS in a dedicated instance? and only letting you reseller multi-tenant?
Shahab: The VAR Guy could be wrong, but it seems like BPOS has moved completely to multi-tenant. Our resident blogger is double-checking.
-TVG