On 7 July 2009, Google said it would remove the beta label from all components of the Google App Premier Edition (GAPE) suite. The company also announced several Gmail features for business customers, including mailbox delegation, mail retention controls, and functions to enhance reliability such as live replication of data to other locations for near-instant disaster recovery and special handling of business users' data to improve uptime. 
One of the perennial debates around Google's push into the commercial sector has been: "Does Google understand the enterprise?" Google's categorization of its commercial Gmail e-mail service as being in "beta" led some enterprises to conclude that the vendor was tone deaf to the needs of an enterprise. But Google viewed the beta label as a way to highlight its difference with established enterprise vendors — the label meant constant and persistent innovation. The beta badge divided Google internally. Some argued that it hindered Google's penetration of the enterprise market while others contended that removing the label would strip Google of a valuable and fundamental difference with established competitors. The removal of the beta label, therefore, heralds the ascendance of pragmatists who have more experience in dealing with the corporate world. This largely symbolic move indicates Google's approach to the enterprise market is maturing. More concretely, the new Gmail features respond to enterprises that have requested functions such as the ability to delegate access of a mailbox to an assistant and the ability to apply granular retention times to specific messages. These changes, along with recent improvements such as support for the BlackBerry and Microsoft Outlook, show that Google is listening and responding aggressively to enterprise concerns. Google is emerging as formidable challenger to Microsoft and IBM in the e-mail market.
|
