I’ve tried to search through all the public information out there to find out how many people are actually using Google’s productivity suite, how many of them are in businesses, and how many are actually paying for the service.

Total number

In August Eric Zeman from the InformationWeek reported the figure of 10 million users. Way up from the 1 million they claimed in April.

If both figures are correct, they supposedly grow by a couple of million a month so if the trend continues they must be around 15 million by now.

Education

Schools and universities get Google Apps (full service without ads) for free, and they did publish some numbers for this sector. In the end of July this year they claimed 1 million users, last month - already 2 million.

Enterprise Adoption

Back in April it was 1 million people from 3,000 businesses. In August CNN reported Google’s claim to have more than 500,000 companies use at least one its programs. However, this includes free version, apps bundled with domain names (e.g. issued by name.com) and Postini customers (who just use the anti-spam filter - not the Google Apps suite.)

As far as the reports go none of Fortune 500 companies have embraced Google Apps in its entirety. Same CNN story says that “the largest Fortune 500 company to use Google Apps is Sanmina-SCI (SANM), an electronics manufacturing company that has 900 of its 45,000 employees using the full package of applications. Another paying customer is Valeo, a publicly-traded French automotive supplier.”

Keep in mind by the way that even when they claim success at a particular account, it often turns out that the report is an exaggeration and it was simply a trial project - not the real transition. Back in June they claimed that they got Procter & Gamble. Which as we now know was just a trial and the company decided to stay with Microsoft later on.

Who is paying?

Great, so is there anyone actually paying for the service? Can you imagine a Fortune 500 company going with an ad-supported edition? I cannot.

The only customer reference which we have with a $ bill assigned is Washington, D.C.: “A year ago, Washington D.C. became the first U.S. city to use Google Apps when it paid $1.9 million for 38,000 accounts.” (CNN)

Are there many customers like that?

Google Apps’ contribution to Google’s annual income was only $4 million in 2007.

Divide that by $50 per user per year fee and you will get just 80,000 yearly user subscriptions for 2007. OK, supposedly a lot of companies were joining mid-/late-2007 - so there were more paying users in 2007 (twice more? three times?)

Obviously extrapolating to 2008 is tough.

Did I miss anything?

Deciphering all these datapoints and trying to turn them into a comprehensive picture is tough: sometimes the numbers include Postini - sometimes they do not, sometimes they are talking only about business users - sometimes they would include consumers, and so on, and so forth.

Were there any other data points that I missed? Leave me a note!

Tags: Cloud Computing, Google, Google Apps, SaaS
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