Despite being only five years old, Google’s enterprise Gmail builds energy with commercial officialdoms with more than 5000 seats and also presents a practicable alternative for Microsoft Exchange Online and several other email services claims Gartner.

“The road to its enterprise insight has been long and rough, but Gmail can now be a well-thought-out a mainstream cloud email provider,” said Matthew Cain, research vice president at Gartner.
“While Gmail’s enterprise email market share currently revolves by a per cent, it has close to half of the market for enterprise cloud email. While cloud email is still in its infancy, at 3 – 4 per cent of the overall enterprise email market, we expect it to be a growth industry, reaching 20 per cent of the market by year-end 2016, and 55 per cent by year-end 2020.”

Cain said that Google Gmail will be the only other email system that has stood the enterprise space for the past several years.

According to him Novell GroupWise and IBM Lotus Notes/Domino have lost their market thrust, Cisco shut its cloud email effort and VMware is refocusing on Zimbra on the enterprise space.
Google still has a lot to complete its journey to enterprise enlightenment.

Financial institutions and other similar large organizations report that required complex email requirements are still not met by Google and it is resistant to feature requests for small segment customers. For instance, banks require surveillance abilities that Google is doubtful of incorporating in Gmail given the limited demand.

Google lacks transparency in areas like continuity, security and compliance that can impede relationships report system integrators and large enterprises.

“Email is not a commodity, and cloud email is still maturing,” said Cain. “We believe that, for most organizations, performing one more on-location upgrade is possible for an organization by 2014, is the most prudent approach. Hybrid deployment is a solution for a less-risky approach to cloud email, where certain mailboxes are present in the cloud and some are placed on premises. Microsoft has a dominance of on-premises email market and this might act as its strength”

“The competition between the two providers has helped the vendors apply cloud expertise to other enterprise cloud undertakings. The contention is expected to make it difficult for suppliers to compete openly in the cloud email and collaboration space.”