Google To Businesses: Our Apps Are All Grown Up Now

One of the consistent knocks on Google's Gmail was that it was never going to come out of beta. But after five years, Google has removed the beta tag from Gmail as well as the rest of its App Suite. That opens the door for Google to continue making overt moves into the office.

The problem for many businesses, as Matthew Glotzbach, director of product management for Google Enterprise, points out on the Official Gmail Blog is that the beta tag tends to imply that a product isn't ready for prime time. The reasons a product or, in this case, a suite of applications may not be ready for business use could include a lack of support.

"We've come to appreciate that the beta tag just doesn't fit for large enterprises that aren't keen to run their business on software that sounds like it's still in the trial phase," wrote Glotzbach. "So we've focused our efforts on reaching our high bar for taking products out of beta, and all the applications in the App Suite have now met that mark."

The suite of Google Apps that lose the beta tag today include Google Calendar, Google Docs and Google Talk, along with Gmail.

In addition to removing the beta tag on some of its more popular offerings, Google is drawing a line in the sand, explicitly pointing potential enterprise users toward information about making the switch from Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes to Google Apps.

The removal of the beta tags on the Google App Suite should, according to Rajen Sheth, senior product manager of Google Apps, remove any doubt that Google Apps is a "mature product suite."

"Since the beginning of the year, we've focused on making it as easy as possible for those large enterprises to switch to Google, and offline access, BlackBerry and Microsoft Outlook support and enterprise contact management were the dynamite that cleared the road to Apps," Sheth wrote on Official Google Enterprise Blog.

Google claims to be prepared to offer the support that enterprise businesses need to consider making the switch to Google Apps. According to Sheth, live data replication to off-site locations for disaster recovery and special handling of users' data in the data center are ready to be offered.

Whether or not enterprises and small businesses are ready or willing to make the jump to Google's cloud-based Apps remains to be seen. However, the fact that Google is making a serious move into the enterprise space is likely to be noticed by its competitors.