14 DAY TRIAL // Google is very interested in the enterprise market, but, despite having been moderately successful so far, it’s been a tough nut to crack. So, the company is trying to do for this market what it has done for everything else, rely on its users to popularize the product. Generally, the company has done little advertising for itself, yet many of its products gained a wide recognition. Google has now released a Go Google ‘cloud calculator,’ which should give an idea of how much a company would save by switching to Google Apps.
“[W]e’ve created the Go Google cloud calculator to let you take a test drive into the cloud. Whether your company is big or small, brand new or been around for a while, this tool will give you a sense of the benefits of going Google in an easy-to-understand way,” Vivian Leung from the Google Enterprise team wrote.
The online tool is simple to use, just type in your company’s name and number of employees. It then proceeds to showcase the savings your company may get by using Google Apps instead of more traditional tools. The presentation is very flashy and certainly looks enticing. And the numbers sure look good.
But, is it really going to convince a company to switch? Things like IT costs aren’t something that you can really predict or estimate without knowing more about that particular company. Just the number of employees is hardly enough information. Of course, Google knows this, but it probably hopes that the cost and time savings sound good enough for a company to want more details.
The cloud calculator is actually a tool for the Google convert to spread the ‘gospel’ among his or her co-workers. In that respect, Google provides several ways of sharing the results. It provides a custom URL you can share by email or IM, but also a presentation PDF, a spreadsheet and even a poster you can print out. And Google may very well need the help, because its competition is not sitting still.