Google has been making some noise of late with wins for their Google Apps solution – notably at The Telegraph newspaper and Sanmina-SCI.
With this weeks GMail outages though I wonder if those customers are considering their decision? I doubt it, but it draws in to focus the approach of running paying business customers on the same platform as your free consumer service. By comparison, our Exchange Online solution doesn’t run on the same platform as Live Mail (aka Hotmail) and I think people would be shocked if it did. I simply couldn’t see a customer like Nokia or Coca Cola agreeing to run their corporate email off the back of something like Hotmail – even for their most basic needs.
Hey-ho, I suppose time will tell which approach works out the best but I’d be more comfortable running my business on a platform dedicated to my needs rather than sharing with a consumer derived platform. The Google Groups discussion shows what some customers think with Dan at Crushpad saying “Microsoft could do better than this, and that's _really_ pathetic.” :)
I know, I know….people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones but I’m pretty optimistic about our solution here and analysts like Phil Shih with Tier 1 Research are questioning Google’s readiness to move to the enterprise. Over at ZDNet, Ryan Stewart is advocating a hybrid approach which seems to be what we’d term Software plus Services to address some of these issues.
It’ll be interesting to watch this play out.
Is Microsoft going to give a SLA for 100% availability of the services? We have customers on Rackspace's Hosted Exchange Service and as excellent and reliable as their service is their SLA is 100% network availability not application availability! Even they had an outage/severely reduced capacity when a freak accident occurred outside their datacentre taking out the power to the local area and their climate control systems not recyling up properly on the backup generators, causing overheating of the servers! Nothing is 100% guaranteed!
Vijay
We've already said publicly our SLA is 99.9% - I agree nothing is 100% guaranteed and that's is where there is room for differentiation.
My point here is more about mixing paid services with free services and whether one impacts the other.
Steve,
This is precisely why BPOS is a joke and will likely falter aside from the few big names Microsoft likely paid off and greased heavilly into signing up for some instant recognition and reputation.
99.9% uptime would have been impressive in 98 with NT 4 and exchange 5.5. If in 2008 you can't deliver. Five 9's you may as well not even try. Anything even approaching an hour outage is not acceptable for business use.
Vlad, sorry but that's naive to even suggest Microsoft has paid off companies like Nokia, AP Moeller, Coca Cola, Energizer, Aviva and Eddie Bauer to use this service. With the scale of commitments these companies have made, the diligence I know went in to their decision I feel VERY confident that they have chosen BPOS on merit and benefit to their company. To suggest otherwise insults the quality of the people the employ IMHO. Frankly I think you're better than that Vlad.
You're assuming that we'll deliver on 99.9% and nothing more. I expect us to deliver service beyond that.
Time will tell but on this occasion I think you may be underestimating Microsoft. Lets come back in a years time and see if I need to eat my words. I've just put the date in my calendar - you should too.
Steve hi,
I applaud the bold approach that Microsoft is leading with by recognising different types of users will expect different levels of support and delivering solutions against these needs. Businesses don't like change too often (as change costs) but consumers expect new features to be added more frequently.
The value of the Microsoft proposition is surely in the widest choice of platform ever on offer from Microsoft (forgive my simplifications) cloud, cloud with SLA, SPLA with partners and on premise with partners and so on....
I’m impressed; an SLA of 99.9% is 45 minutes per month and will be acceptable by most organisations - great starting point.
Regards, Gareth