I just received an email from the good folks over at Google that Transparent is now officially authorized as a Google Apps Reseller.  As far as I can tell we’re one only a handful in Canada, and even fewer here in Vancouver.  Google requires that Authorized Resellers have a excellent understanding of their platform, and can demonstrate bringing value to its end users. I believe there is just over 1000 worldwide at the time of writing of this post.   Compare that to the some 400,000 Microsoft partners.   I have a feeling that will quickly change in months and years ahead.

We’re pretty excited over here about the opportunities that will bring, for both us and for our clients. It’s means more options at the table as far productivity software and collaboration, and that’s long overdue in my opinion.

So what does that mean for your business?  Well, in a few words: a highly available and scalable infrastructure with no upfront capital expenses.  That fits quite nicely into our mantra of converting large capital costs into predictable monthly operational expenses.

For our initial Google Apps project, we migrated a local Vancouver company’s Microsoft Exchange mailboxes to the Google Apps platform.  We looked at the costs of purchasing, installing, licensing, and managing a Microsoft Exchange server for 15 users and compare that to the costs of Google Apps. It was pretty compelling, to say the least.

Google Apps will cost $50/year per user.  It comes with 25GB of storage, and include anti-virus and spam filtering.  For this particular customer that works out to $750 per year.  That’s less than the licensing alone for Exchange.  A lot less to worry about too – no patching, upgrades, antivirus, antispam, backup…. the list goes on.

Not to say the project went without a hitch – there’s always seems to be a few ‘gotchas’ lurking, but all in all it was rather smooth.  We performed the migration in phases, to give everybody time to adjust and deal with any glitches as they came.  Users could continue to use Outlook, or the Gmail web interface, depending on their preference.  That removed any anxiety that users felt – “Don’t mess with my Outlook!”.   We learned a lot in the process, and are excited to do more of these types of projects.

Naturally there’s a lot more to it than just putting your mail up into the cloud and washing your hands of any IT woes.  You’ve still have  specialized applications, desktops, anti-virus, files and documents, and issues with privacy laws (depending on your industry and region).  There’s a long way to go here, and not everything is ‘cloud ready’.  It helps to have a trusted IT advisor help navigate the options.