The enterprise version of Gmail is gaining traction in commercial organizations, says research analyst Gartner. This is especially so in the case of enterprises with more than 5,000 seats, where Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) has nearly half the market for cloud email. Given that cloud email is expected to grow from the current 3-4 percent to 20 percent of the enterprise email market by end-2016 and 55 percent by end-2020, big growth is predicted for Google. 

Of course, the competition isn't lying still either: Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) itself launched Office 365 at the end of June as part of its cloud response to Google Apps, and is hence well-positioned to capture a significant proportion of the enterprise cloud email market share as well. I've used Exchange Online, the messaging component of Office 365, and I'm impressed with it.

While praising Google for the "blistering pace" in which improvements were implemented onto its platform, Gartner also listed a number of criticisms. One is that Google focuses on features geared to benefit the broader consumer market more than specific features desired by groups of users.

In addition, Gartner analyst Matthew Cain wrote about how "Google remains especially opaque, refusing to share details about the proprietary code that underlies access control and privileged access mechanisms" or about how it does its offline backups for recovery from outages.

For more:
- check out this press release
- check out this article at eWeek
- check out this article at Computerworld

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