Google boss Larry Page
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Google will soon be turning off its popular spam filtering and e-mail archiving product, Postini. It will shift Postini users to Google Apps.
At last count, Google had over 26 million Postini users, many of them at enterprises. They use this cloud service to filter e-mail for viruses and spam. Postini currently works with Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes, so Gmail isn’t required.
Starting this fall, Google will be telling customers that they have to switch.
Apps is Google’s cloud office suite that includes email, calendars and documents. Google has integrated Postini’s security features into Apps. Google promises that Postini customers who sign on for Apps will still be able to use it with Exchange and Lotus Notes. Naturally, they’ll also get Gmail thrown into the mix.
If customers don’t want Apps, “your Postini service will terminate at your contract end date,” Google says.
The first set of customers that will be asked to switch are those renewal dates of November 1, 2012. Customers with renewal dates between mid-August and October 31, 2012 will get a chance to keep the service a little while longer, until Google makes the full transition sometime in 2013. Google hasn’t announced exactly when that will happen.
This is a pretty good way to grab enterprise customers for Google Apps, instead of letting them move to Microsoft’s competing Office 365. Microsoft has vowed to really push Office 365 in the coming months to compete with Google Apps.
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