Google Offers Free Work Apps To Rival’s Customers

The idea is that the savings gets passed onto customers, removing one more thing in the way of going with Google Apps.

As Microsoft threw its weight into the market for cloud based producvity apps, the question remained how would Google respond and how important was this competition to their business, which is historically driven by advertising revenue and dominating the search market.

The only catch with this offer is that the qualifying companies have to promise that once the EA is up, you’ll use Google Apps for Work for a year at its standard price of $5/user/month for just the productivity tools, or $10/user/month for unlimited storage. While Google didn’t call out Microsoft or IBM by name when making the announcement, it’s well understood that these are the top competitors for its Google Apps productivity suite and related tools. And it says it will chip in on a few of the deployment costs following the earlier contract’s expiration, by also connecting the new customer with a Google for Work Partner.

Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin have long believed that given the sheer amount of time that people spend at their jobs, ignoring the workplace would be doing a disservice to Google’s long-standing corporate mission – “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”.

The company says that it will give interested customers access to Google Apps for Work for free, while they’re still under an enterprise agreement (EA) with another provider.

Google makes the argument that since its launch nine years ago, Google Docs has been built out with the essentials to compete with the likes of Microsoft, though Rich Rao, head of global sales for Google Apps for Work, never specifically mentioned Microsoft. This figure is based on a basic Microsoft Enterprise Agreement, Google explains (PDF) on the Google Apps website.

And so Google is paying a bounty of $25 per user to these resellers, out of pocket, to help cover the costs of training new Google Apps users. This includes everyone from small independent firms to large consultant practices. As every business who switches away from Office 365 is only that much more likely to not rely on Microsoft for other services.

“It’s cash from us, on behalf of customers, for resellers”, Rao says. That meant Microsoft’s ability to bring them back to the fold was sort of a double punch for Google. And enterprises, with their deep pockets and hundreds or thousands of users, are the most prized customers of all.