Google Apps is and has been, since it’s by invitation only beta days, the primary IT infrastructure for OMBNexGen: We live in Google Apps!  While the various individual principles were using Google’s personal services for some time, once we came together to form the new company, OMBNexGen, LLC, we purposefully deployed all of our “internal” (remember for us “internal” is a concept that lives on the Internet Cloud) IT infrastructure through the Google Apps for business services.

Our email is hosted and managed by Google Apps, our office automation solutions like Wordprocessing, Spreadsheets, etc., are provided through Google Apps, and in addition our collaborative workspace services, i.e., Google Chat, Google Video, shared documents, and our Intranet services are all provided by Google Apps.  We use the Premium Google Apps version so that we can have the security and SPAM services of the Google Postini products as well as compliance and email retention services.  In a sentence, Google Apps is our IT infrastructure.

As early Google Apps converts and by invitation beta testers, we have developed an incredibly strong and rich skill set in all of the Google offerings (Google Analytics, web-tools, maps, etc…).  To a great extent Google Apps epitomizes are philosophy of what is smart about the direction the Internet can take in terms of transforming IT into Next Generation solutions.

While Google Apps is completely second hand to us, we have come to understand and learn that even today many organizations don’t know or understand the extent of what Google offers in terms of commercial class enterprise IT services.  Everyone knows Google search, but lots of people don’t know Google Apps.

If an organization does nothing else to upgrade their IT infrastructure to Next Generation Internet services, it must and should seriously consider Google Apps for email.  Email is one of those organizational must have services, like a phone and electricity, that should be as trivial and reliable as having a phone or electricity; Google Apps hosted email for business is as good as it gets for enterprise email.  How many organizations can say that about their MS Exchange environments! Furthermore we challenge anyone to show us an email solution that is less expensive, while still being enterprise grade and quality, than Google Apps business hosted email.