Google has been boasting since at the very least June that Workspace, its productiveness and collaboration platform, has 3 billion customers, highlighting the large scale of its largely client buyer base. But for enterprise adoption, the corporate nonetheless faces a number of boundaries to wrestling market share from its largest rival, Microsoft’s Office 365.The newest Workspace consumer stats quantity to a major improve from 2 billion on the finish of 2019. Although Google hasn’t provided particulars, nearly all of these are doubtless Gmail customers: Google Workspace (beforehand G Suite) has 4 paid subscription choices, and can be obtainable at no cost, offering entry to options corresponding to Gmail, Drive, Docs, and Meet for free of charge.As of March 2020, there have been 6 million paid clients, based on Google’s most up-to-date publicly obtainable stats.Adoption by companies — particularly bigger enterprises — is rising, however slowly, based on analysts, significantly in the case of matching the dimensions of market chief Microsoft and its Office 365 suite. Google grew its share of the productiveness software program market to 10.3% in 2020, based on analysis from Gartner, taking about 2% from Microsoft. Microsoft continues to be the clear chief nonetheless, with 89.2%. Overall, the productiveness software program suite market grew 18.2% throughout 2020.“Our market share analysis shows that Google is continually growing and taking market share, but at a rate that’s still quite minimal: it’s not making a huge dent into what is a Microsoft-dominated space,” stated Michael Woodbridge, analysis director at Gartner’s Digital Workplace, Content and Insights staff.Other analysis paints an analogous image. In Okta’s annual survey of office apps utilized by its personal identification administration software program clients, Microsoft 365, which bundles Office 365 and Windows 10, remained because the clear chief, with Workspace in fourth place. (Okta’s view right here is probably going conservative: as a competitor to Microsoft’s Active Directory, its buyer base naturally skews in the direction of clients that use non-Microsoft merchandise.)A latest CCS Insight report on app collaboration utilization confirmed that Teams, the workstream collaboration device inside Office 365, is essentially the most extensively used (42% of respondents), in comparison with Google Workspace as a complete (21%). That latter quantity represents a 17% improve from the earlier yr.Google
Google Meet being utilized in a Google Doc
“It’s quite an uptick year-on-year,” stated Angela Ashenden, principal analyst at CCS Insight, citing adoption of Google’s Meet video app through the pandemic as a possible driver. Nevertheless, there’s nonetheless “some way to go” when it comes to widespread enterprise adoption, she stated.Interconnectedness turns into a serious themeGoogle has made a number of vital adjustments to Workspace because the arrival of normal supervisor Javier Soltero from Microsoft in late 2019, as it really works to persuade extra companies to undertake the software program suite.The rebranding of Workspace from G Suite in 2020 coincided with efforts to take away among the silos between functions, with interconnectedness rising as a key theme up to now yr. This has included the power to entry totally different Workspace apps with out switching screens, corresponding to with the ability to begin a Meet video name straight from Docs to collaborate with colleagues. Google earlier this yr additionally launched its Smart Canvas idea, which breaks down components of its productiveness apps into modular parts — corresponding to duties and polls — that may be inserted into a number of paperwork and up to date in actual time. While others corresponding to Microsoft and varied startups have related capabilities, it’s an instance of how Google desires to assist new methods of working going ahead, significantly round hybrid distant work. Google
Google Smart Canvas
“If you create a platform where the bleed between the different capabilities is much more natural, then more people will use more parts of the product,” stated Ashenden. This, in flip, makes the product stickier for customers, with the potential to change into “much more central to an organization’s collaboration strategy,” she stated. At final week’s Cloud Next occasion, Google furthered this intention of connectedness all through its portfolio with the combination of AppSheet into Gmail, a transfer Google hopes will make the no-code platform it acquired final yr extra accessible to customers.Enabling new methods of working (corresponding to popularizing co-authoring) has lengthy been a spotlight for the corporate with Google Apps, G Suite, and now Workspace. That message resonates much more at a time of great disruption to how workplace work is carried out.“The future of work is the battleground [for software vendors],” stated Woodbridge. “Google comes at this with a proposition that provides you with new way of working…entirely browser-based, interlinked, collaborative, synchronous editing in all the applications, new content types. All of that starts to move an organization into thinking about work in a more collaborative way.”However, that sort of messaging generally is a double-edged sword; many companies are conservative in the case of change and sluggish to undertake both new applied sciences or totally different approaches to work. “The proposition of huge disruptive change makes large enterprises anxious,” stated Woodbridge, significantly when competing with — or dislodging — productiveness and collaboration apps that staff could have used for many years.Another robust level for Google Workspace in relation to Office 365 has been value, and it stays unclear what impression Microsoft’s latest worth will increase right here could have on market share.Collaboration and workflowA key space of competitors between the Google and Microsoft suites entails workstream collaboration, stated Woodbridge. Although Workspace — like G Suite earlier than it — options an immediate messaging device (referred to as Chat in its most up-to-date guise), Google’s technique for collaboration largely centered round Gmail because the hub for teamwork lately. This performed to considered one of Google’s benefits, the prevalence of its e-mail consumer (there have been 1.5 billion Gmail customers in 2019).There have been indicators of a method shift, nonetheless, with larger emphasis now on Workspace Chat and Spaces, which arrived final month to switch Chat Rooms, as the way in which to attach staff. Spaces, which serves as a central space for collaborating on paperwork, viewing staff messages, and extra, is a better competitor to Slack and Teams, though it launched simply weeks in the past and so is “pretty early in that cycle,” stated Woodbridge.“The adoption of Teams to support [collaboration] has grown exponentially over the past two years, and Teams has become the primary user application within Microsoft 365 to support remote work. That’s not as strong in the Google platform,” stated Woodbridge.At Cloud Next, Google indicated that enabling customers to get work completed in Workspace is a precedence, and it is specializing in including first-party integrations with its personal instruments with third-party apps. The integration with Atlassian’s ticketing software program Jira introduced at Cloud Next contributes to this imaginative and prescient, although Workspace lags rival workstream collaboration platforms on this respect, as a result of they’ve extra intensive ties with exterior apps.Other corporations have begun to strengthen ties with their very own enterprise apps, with the objective of extra deeply embedding staff collaboration into consumer workflows. It’s an space the place Google lacks its personal story: although it developed instruments for the contact middle lately, it doesn’t have its personal portfolio of enterprise apps to connect with Workspace.“The big question they’re trying to address is around workflows and integrations: ‘How do we bring processes into Workspace rather than it just being the place where you discuss things? How do we make it where the work is done?’ That has been a bit of a gap in their strategy,” stated Ashenden. While Google is transferring within the that course, there’s extra to be completed in constructing out third-party integrations that allow workflows in Workspace. “It’s going to take a while before a.) they have enough of them and b.) they communicate to customers that it’s something they can do in Workspace. So there’s definitely some catching up that needs to be done in that regard.”
Copyright © 2021 IDG Communications, Inc.