Google Apps Can Be Small Firm’s Best Friend
When Ritu Raj opened Wag Hotel as a luxury home away from home for pampered dogs, he decided he would run the business on Google applications.
Employees check in dogs on touch-screen monitors, make appointments and use e-mail, all with Google Apps. The Web-based suite of tools — which includes corporate e-mail, calendar, word processing, spreadsheets and presentation software — is aimed squarely at Microsoft’s lucrative Office software franchise.
For Raj, the decision started with cost. Apps is cheap or free, has more liberal usage terms than Office and doesn’t require a tech team to set up and manage.
“But it’s not just that,” he says. “You have no idea how much time it takes to train people. The young people we attract to work here are very familiar with Google. That’s a tremendous savings.”
A free version of Google Apps does not include tech support. For $50 a year per employee, a Premier version includes tech phone support and more e-mail storage. Universities get Apps for free. Some large ones have signed on, including Arizona State University and Northwestern University.
Google Apps product manager Matt Glotzbach says the company has picked up 500,000 customers for Apps since it launched in February 2007 and is adding 20,000 users every day.
Using Gmail is a big attraction for some small firms. By 2012, business use of Web-based mail will jump to 20%, says analyst Austin at Gartner.
“Customers don’t know they’re sending it to a Gmail account,” says Chris Montgomery, whose family runs four Midas Muffler shops near Houston. “They’re sending it to Midas, which makes it more professional.”
Before switching, “We constantly had issues with our e-mail being down,” says Jeremy Stoppelman, CEO of Yelp, a website that offers local listings and reviews. “Now, instead of having an IT person maintain the system, we can devote those resources elsewhere.”
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