Microsoft is gunning for the online productivity tools user base in a big way, marketing Exchange Online in an effort to take on Gmail. So, how do these two platforms compare?
If you’re looking at uptime, which is a pretty big number for any cloud-based system, the Google Enterprise team reported earlier this week that their actual Gmail uptime percentage for 2012 was 99.983% – better than Google’s guaranteed 99.9% rate.
“This translates to an average of just over seven minutes of service disruption per month over the last year, and most users experienced no disruption at all,” Venkat Panchapakesan, Vice President of Engineering reported.
Curious to see how Microsoft compared, the folks at Cloud Sherpas decided to analyze 151 days of Exchange Online incident reports to get Microsoft’s uptime percentage. Their figures were notable: in that measured period, Exchange Online had a 97.929% uptime rate, lower than Microsoft’s 99.9% uptime promise.
There are, I would say, a couple of big caveats with this report: first, Cloud Sherpas seems to equate Gmail vs. Exchange stats as a Google Apps vs. Office 365 face off. The last I heard, Gmail was only one part of Google Apps, and Exchange a component of Office 365. Downtime for one does not reflect downtime for all.
Plus, the figures could be cherry picked a bit: Exchange Online was monitored from Sept. 23, 2012 to February 2, 2013, and the reported Gmail figures are from the entire 2012 calendar year, not just the same 151-day timeframe. For all we know, Exchange Online was problem free for all of 2012 until September 22. Or, after January 1 of this year, Gmail tanked a few times.
Google and Microsoft (and their respective proxies) will no doubt be butting heads in this space for quite some time. What is interesting to me are the anecdotal reports I keep hearing from workplaces that have shifted to Google Apps: people love to use Google Apps for collaboration and shared storage, but when documents are actually being created, Microsoft Office is still the tool of choice.
There are no clear winners yet in this space, but for now, there is no getting around the fact that Exchange Online was only up 97.929% for almost half a year, which comes out to just over three days of lost productivity. The infographic below tells Cloud Sherpas’ story:
Lead image courtesy of Shutterstock.
