Can Google make a dent at MS Office 365 with SoftWatch?

ISRAEL: SoftWatch, a player in Application Usage Analytics, announced signing a global agreement with Google to market its Application Analytics SaaS solutions. Under the agreement, Google will encourage its sales force and global network of Google Apps re-sellers to work with SoftWatch and offer the service to customers across the globe.

SoftWatch solutions basically analyse to what extent employees are actuallyusing applications and cloud services, and provides user segmentation to light and heavy users for both on premise and web-based applications. Industry-watchers are, hence, reading this move as Google's way to make enterprises realise the pragmatic reality of MS Office use by employees and make them lean towards Google Apps.

"SoftWatch analyses clearly show that for the vast majority of employees in businesses today, an Office license is overkill,” said Sebastien Marotte, vice president, Google Apps for Work. “SoftWatch can bring substantial value to our customers by providing insight into their workers’ real versus perceived needs, empowering them to embrace Google Apps for Work, save money and work the way they choose.”

Incidentally, SoftWatch had recently released an updated benchmark of 146 companies with 400,000 employees. The main findings of the benchmark were that the average employee used MS Office applications (excluding Outlook) for only 15 minutes a day for editing activities and that the percentage of heavy users in PowerPoint, Word and Excel was two per cent, nine per cent and 23 per cent respectively.

The benchmark also showed 65 per cent of the employees were segmented as Light Users on all three applications, representing a rather low dependency on MS Office. The number of employees who heavily used two MS Office applications was less than two per cent and the number of employees who were using all three applications heavily was virtually zero.

The study concludes that the magnitude of change when moving to cloud-based productivity suites is less than perceived: typically, 80 per cent of MS office users do not use advanced features and can move rather easily to alternative cloud based solutions. This should encourage decision makers to seriously evaluate alternatives to MS Office and realize up to 90 per cent savings on their MS Office licenses spending.

SoftWatch analyses allow enterprises to assess their actual usage of MS Office applications, Google Apps, cloud storage and online conferencing services. By using SoftWatch, enterprises can implement a three-step structured method of transitioning to Google Apps for Work, as the company explains in detail. The first step is making an informed decision whether to move to Google Apps based on applications usage analysis; In the second step, a usage-based transition plan is built based on detailed user segmentation; finally, the transition plan is executed whereas SoftWatch service serves as a monitoring and management vehicle to ensure adoption of Google Apps and optimize MS Office license spending.

“We are very excited to work with Google and provide insightful usage information to decision makers who are planning and executing an adoption of cloud based productivity suites" said Uri Arad and Moshe Kozlovski, co-CEOs of SoftWatch. "This agreement will allow us to bring the message of using Application Usage Analytics as a key enabler for making informed decisions, optimizing resources, planning and executing a transition to cloud based productivity suites".

The recent agreement was reached following a year of collaboration between SoftWatch and Google Apps re-sellers where customers' feedback was extremely appreciative.