Google Workspace should have a solid position in any high-growth MSP’s portfolio. Google Workspace (formerly G Suite) is Google’s flagship office productivity and collaboration platform built for businesses. Over the past decade, Google has emerged as Microsoft’s main challenger in the workplace collaboration space. From its billions of Gmail users, Google has continuously innovated the Google Workspace platform and carved out a solid market share position with business users. What’s more, many of the most innovative companies in the world, such as Netflix, Spotify, and Salesforce, now standardize on Google Workspace for office productivity and collaboration.
For growth oriented MSPs, it is impossible to ignore Google’s success and market share with Google Workspace. This blog will explore why high-growth MSPs should look to cover 100% of the market by adding Google Workspace as a key solution in their managed services stack.
1. Google Workspace - Powered by Google Cloud
Google Workspace is powered by Google Cloud, one of the world’s largest and most reliable cloud platforms. Alongside AWS and Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud powers some of the largest and most-used cloud apps in the world, such as Gmail, YouTube, and Google Search.
Why Google Cloud?
- $47 billion invested in the last 3 years
- Over 1 billion unique IP addresses served daily
- Global-scale – with 21 regions currently and more on the way
Leading companies from around the world rely on Google Cloud for their applications and infrastructure. Google’s uncommonly high reliability is a key reason partners should trust Google Workspace.
2. Business Opportunity: Serving the Whole Market with Google
Over six million companies rely on Google Workspace for office productivity and collaboration. In the past decade, Google has relentlessly chipped away at Microsoft’s dominant market position in office productivity. Today, Google now has 10% of the market and is growing at approximately 1% of share per year. Moreover, Google continues to innovate and attract some of the most exciting startups and new tech players on the scene.
For MSPs, Google’s growth and trajectory can’t be ignored. To reach best-in-class growth rates, an MSP simply can’t turn a blind eye to 10% or more of the overall market. While there is no doubt about Microsoft’s #1 position with MSPs, there is a great business opportunity to grow revenues and client relevancy by building a solid Google practice alongside the Microsoft 365 platform.
3. Financial Opportunity: Lucrative Margins
Google is a relative newcomer to the IT channel space, but that doesn’t mean they haven’t built a winning formula for partnering with MSPs and VARs. In fact, Google’s profit margins on Google Workspace are roughly double Microsoft’s for the standard SMB productivity and collaboration packages. While Microsoft’s monthly margins for partners are roughly 9%, Google Workspace sports 20% recurring gross margins across the board.
And just like with Microsoft 365, Google Workspace is easily integrated into a fully managed service offering, enabling MSPs to drive 50%+ recurring service gross margins. The Google Workspace platform contains everything a business needs to work, collaborate, and grow. Partners can specialize in deployment, consulting, security configuration and management, while assisting organizations with fully maximizing the value of the platform, especially in the areas of communication and collaboration.
4. Easy to Manage
Google makes it easy to do business, as well. Google Workspace is available in the leading distributor cloud marketplaces, such as those offered by Ingram Micro Cloud, Tech Data Cloud, and Sherweb, to name just a few. Purchasing, subscription management, and cost management are all a snap, with the deep integration between the distributor marketplaces and the Google Workspace admin console.
Google keeps pricing simple, with easy pricing tiers for small and medium businesses and enterprises. Everything is month to month. Within the SMB and enterprise tiers, the good, better, and best tiering strategy also helps partners easily deploy the right package to the right client.
5. A Solution Your Clients Will Love
There is a reason why Google has taken a big bite out of Microsoft’s commanding position. Users simply love the product. Google Workspace is a cloud-native application platform, enabling employees to work from anywhere with any kind of device. Whether working in the browser or from a mobile device, content creation and collaboration is seamless with a cloud-native approach. Google has been a relentless innovator in the space, showing again and again how the cloud-first approach for email, word processing, spreadsheets, and presentations wins every time.
Google Workspace is also noteworthy for its deeply integrated security capabilities. Gmail’s native anti-spam and anti-phishing features are second to none. Google offers partners a host of advanced and enterprise-class features for data leak prevention (DLP), data governance and vaulting, and mobile device management.
Finally, for most organizations, ease-of-use and employee adoption are critically important. In study after study, Google’s cloud-native approach drives higher levels of employee engagement, productivity and collaboration without extra training and support investments. This is when the real ROI kicks in.
Completing Your Arsenal
MSPs are the technology shepherds in a world that is confronting a rapidly evolving workplace. From the post-pandemic recovery to the changing attitudes towards remote work, organizations are looking to technology and their service providers to keep their employees connected, collaborating and communicating no matter the challenge. MSPs can meet this opportunity and succeed by leveraging Google Workspace as one of their leading offerings for office productivity and collaboration.
