The leading provider of private business Clouds has announced its full integration with Google Apps this week. The highly anticipated announcement opened the possibility for business owners to leverage the Google suite of applications that are growing in popularity, especially for companies trying to save as much as possible on IT budgets.
LevelCloud provides a fully integrated platform that ties all of a business IT systems into one centralized, easy to use platform and delivers it from the Cloud. Their solution eliminates the need for servers, expensive maintenance, licensing, and the headaches that come with dealing with IT. The majority of customers still choose to have the full version of Microsoft Office integrated into their LevelCloud platform, however the market for web based apps is growing.
“Although we specialize in building private clouds for businesses, the integration with Google Apps opens the possibility for a client to leverage the Public Cloud for their email and/or productivity software”, mentioned Adrian Francoz, Director of Business Development. Many businesses are not entirely comfortable putting their data in the hands of the Public Cloud and not having control of where and how the data is stored, so they choose to have the traditional Microsoft Office suite hosted on their LevelCloud servers.
The integration offers direct access to each user’s Google Apps account from their WebTop, eliminating the need for multiple logins. It also lets the user see a summary of their E-mail and Calendar activities while integrating with other IT recourses seamlessly. “From a companies perspective it depend if you are ready to use a web based application, or a “web app” to create and edit documents. Some clients find it convenient to work directly from a browser, yet others prefer the full featured and slightly more responsive functionality of a fully hosted version of Microsoft Office. We believe in flexibility and this integration provides just that to our clients”, said LevelCloud CTO Olivier Matime.
Many LevelCloud partners and their customers rely on Google Gmail, Calendar and Docs as a low cost alternative to Microsoft Exchange. This integration allows businesses to leverage existing investments in Google Apps which I think is a huge value-added proposition,” says Biren Shukla, CEO of LevelCloud.