AAPT to resell Google Apps- UPDATED

Stuart Corner
Thursday, 17 December 2009 03:53

Your IT - Home IT

After adopting Google applications for its own internal communications, AAPT has announced that it will offer Google Apps to its business customers.
AAPT says it will offer "a comprehensive suite of web-based tools including email, internal websites, video and document sharing," under the brand name AAPT Apps. AAPT COO, David Yuile, told iTWire that the full range of Google Apps would be available through AAPT. "We will be offering the Google Apps core offering and people will be able to choose what they want from the gadgets library.

"We will be a reseller but more importantly, because things are in the cloud the value proposition of the network becomes very relevant - you have to have good connectivity and our network is directly plugged into Google's global network with caching etc."

According to Yuile "By adopting AAPT Apps, businesses will experience dramatic cost savings, improved reliability and security, as well as empowering their people with collaborative tools like document sharing."

He told iTWire: "We think a lot of our customers will be excited about reducing their cost base. We are seeing new potential customers coming to us that we have never really been able to speak to before."

AAPT says the apps are available to business customers from today, "with competitive pricing packages tailored to individual requirements."

In November AAPT announced that it was moving its internal video communications, intranet and email on to Google Apps. However it is still in the very early stages of migrating its email. Yuile said: "We will do the first 100 users in January...The migration has to tie in to an Exchange server migration and there are lots of things like BlackBerries hanging of that."

In 2007 AAPT announced that it would sell Google search appliances in Australia. These are units that use Google search technology to allow enterprises to search their internal data resources. However Yuile said these had never taken off. "I think the reality is that Google is not doing much with that any more. We have deployed it internally but I don't think we have sold it to any customers.

He added: "It's a bit incongruous with a cloud offering. And the thing people search most is their email and you can search Google Mail really quickly."