Google Apps Gains Major Consulting Support From Cap Gemini

Google Apps crossed another hurdle in their bid to gain corporate acceptance today, Cap Gemini, arguably the largest consulting firm on the planet after IBM announced plans to provide consulting services to companies wishing to migrate to Google Apps from their traditional desktops applications.

As someone who has undertaken a number of these projects, moving from the desktop to the webtop is not without its challenges particularity when email and Microsoft Exchange is involved.

As with just about anything Microsoft, Exchange is much easier and quicker to put information into than to get it back out of accurately so hiring an experienced hand or two to help out makes a lot of sense, a fact Cap Gemini no doubt is well aware of. In addition establishing the relationship between the web and our various hand-held devices (Blackberry,...) is also no small feat, so I am sure they will earn their fees.

For more on Cap Gemini entry into Google App consulting check out Info Worlds: Capgemini to provide IT services for Google Apps:

A new member of the Google Enterprise Professional program, Capgemini now offers training, support, integration, and other services for Google Apps Premier Edition customers, the vendors plan to announce Monday. Downsides include security concerns over the hosting of sensitive data with a vendor outside the corporate firewall, server downtime problems and feature sets that often are less extensive than the ones from packaged software products.

The partnership with Capgemini, one of the world's largest IT services companies with over 75,000 employees in 32 countries, makes Google Apps more palatable to large organizations that prefer IT services providers to assist them with changes and additions to their large, complex IT architectures.

"Our overall partner strategy is to make sure that those customers that come on board have the services they need or request," said Kevin Smith, Google's head of enterprise partnerships.

In the case of Google Apps Premier Edition customers, some may hire Capgemini to help them with e-mail migration, with adding the suite to an existing single sign-on system, or with making sure that the Calendar component synchronizes properly with employees devices, Smith said.

Meanwhile, Capgemini, which generated revenue of $10.4 billion in 2006, added Google Apps to the portfolio of products it supports because it believes that demand for software-as-a-service (SaaS) collaboration and communication suites will grow strongly in coming years, company officials said. For Capgemini, offering services for a SaaS suite like Google Apps Premier Edition is a natural extension of its broad expertise providing outsourced desktop support to more than 1 million users worldwide, they said.

Perhaps it takes big name consulting companies coming forward to overcome the inherent believe that having corporate information hosted some where besides in the corporate mainframe or corporate managed desktops can still be secured. But the truth is, with a few well placed security addons the information can be just as secure or more so.

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