Premier Edition is the paid-for version of apps, whereas both the Standard and Education Editions are free, explained Peter Lorant, Postini’s senior director of marketing for EMEA. Google announced it back in April at the same time as it unveiled a technology partnership with Postini and started offering the latter’s policy management and message recovery capabilities as part of the paid-for edition.
Premier consists of Gmail, Talk, Calendar, Docs (which has documents, spreadsheets and presentations) and Start Page, as well as the Postini services, and costs $50 per user, per year. Lorant said these include configurable spam and virus filtering, central management of content (he cited the ability to add different footer on documents depending on which country a document is distributed from, for instance), compliance auditing and restoration of documents for up to 90 days.
The service will initially be available in English, but by November 27 it will be available in another 27 languages, he went on.
And of course, there are the 36,000 businesses that take Postini’s services already, comprising 11 million individual users whose email traffic is handled by the company. For them, he went on, Google is offering a free trial of Google Apps Premier through June 30, 2008, provided they sign up by the end of this year. It will be interesting if all 11 million sign up for the service at 25GB each, the Postini exec quipped.
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Lorant made the point that Google has enjoyed success in signing up smaller companies to its paid-for SaaS apps offering in the small and medium-sized business offering, while Postini is traditionally strong in the enterprise space. With the email policy management and compliance capabilities it is now bundling into Premier Edition, it will be interesting to see whether Google has any success in enticing corporate accounts away from Microsoft.
