Comments on: MS Exchange Local vs Hosted vs Google for 10,000 Users

By: stuartm

stuartm — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 00:47:45 +0000

My company deals with all three options although not usually with 10,000 users, in fact I would say there’s probably only a handful companies in NZ that have 10,000 users, and I doubt any of them have completely outsourced to either Google or Microsoft.

Local Exchange costs can vary greatly depending on what infrastructure you have in place already. For example, if you’ve already invested in an enterprise-level SAN, then it’s trivial to add storage capacity for your Exchange environment. The same goes for your virtual infrastructure – if you already have a large VMware farm in place, then the costs of adding 20 virtual nodes to run Exchange would be a lot less than having to start from scratch. Another question for an onsite installation is what level of DR do you need. Most large companies would want full-failover to another data centre in a different city (usually Auckland/Wellington) but if you already have this in place, then it keeps your costs down.

With the online options to get a better comparison, you would compare Microsoft’s Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) with Google Apps Premier Edition (GAPE). BPOS gives you Exchange, Sharepoint, Office Live Meeting, and Office Communicator. GAPE gives you Mail, Contacts, Calendar, Chat, Sites, Docs and Video.

Microsoft’s BPOS would cost NZ$141,500 per month, or NZ$1,698,000 per year. This price is quoted in NZD so no need to convert from USD, see here for more details: http://www.microsoft.com/online/en-nz/business-productivity.mspx
Google’s Premier Edition costs US$500,000 per year, or converted to current NZD value of about NZ$715,000

Looking at pure costs, Google’s offering is cheaper than Microsoft’s online offerings, but whether it’s cheaper than an onsite solution depends largely on your existing infrastructure.

By: 1 Reason You Shouldn’t Care About Microsoft vs Google In Cloud Approaches | The WaveAdept Blog

Sun, 21 Feb 2010 19:30:55 +0000

[...] BTW: For another excellent post on the ongoing differences check out Wekadesign’s, “MS Exchange Local Vs Hosted Vs Google For 10,000 Users” [...]

By: MIke Riversdale

MIke Riversdale — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 08:24:19 +0000

I’ve had this saved in my faves for sometime now and I’m glad I did as it’s a great article, thanks.

My only addition is that cloud-based services (SaaS) such as Google Apps (and MS Exhange EH) have the glorious ability to deliver the lastest version without any ICT intervention – no business down-time and ICT internal costs. With large service additions such as the recent Google Groups release to Google Apps there should be a cost of comms/change management but there’s no explicit ICT cost.

Thanks again for the post, most excellent.

[Disclosure: my company, WaveAdept, is an Authorised Google Apps Re-seller