Google Apps vs. Microsoft Exchange

Google really seems to be pushing its Apps offerings with case studies of companies that have migrated their comms, CRM and other software to the Google cloud.  They've also put up some online tools to demonstrate the cost savings that can be made.  Of course, the data needs to be treated with caution but Google is being pretty transparent about the assumptions behind its online calculator.

You can enter how many employees are affected and the hourly rate for an IT manager and you get a table like this:

I knocked up a graph of this data for between 1 and 10 employees - you can see the direction of travel. The high upfront costs of MS Exchange start to amortise as employee numbers grow but using Apps is still over 10 times cheaper than Exchange with 10 staff.  Increasing the number of employees does bring the lines closer but they remain almost parallel.

Security fears, a desire for control and inertia will keep millions on Exchange for the forseeable future but Google is slowly chipping away at the business and non-profit markets.  How far they get into the enterprise sector remains to be seen.