Google for Work much quicker to deploy than Office 365

Companies that deploy Google for Work do it an average of four months faster than those that choose Microsoft Office 365, according to a new report. However, Microsoft stole more customers away from Google than it lost to the rival cloud provider.

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Companies that deploy Google for Work migrate to the platform at least four months faster, on average, than organizations that choose Office 365 for their collaboration needs, according to a new report from BetterCloud, a company that sells IT tools to manage both cloud suites. The average amount of time it takes to research, plan and go live with a Google for Work deployment is 11.2 months, BetterCloud found, compared to the average of 15.3 months it takes to complete the same process for Office 365.

BetterCloud sent a 30-question survey to 100,000 IT professionals and received 1,500 responses from individuals who work for 1,200 different companies that currently use Google for Work (930 respondents) or Office 365 (570 respondents).

[Related News Analysis: Office 365 and Google for Work adoption rates to grow rapidly]

"The world of IT is at a tipping point, and at the center are IT professionals experiencing once-in-a-career shifts in their roles and responsibilities," wrote David Politis, BetterCloud's founder and CEO, in a statement. "In 2016, IT professionals are beginning to offload their routine work to cloud software and service providers, giving them more time to focus on strategic work."

A trend away from Google toward Microsoft

BetterCloud's survey also highlights the platforms companies used before they switched to the Google or Microsoft productivity suites. Nearly half (49 percent) of current Google for Work customers came from Microsoft Exchange, and more than a third (35 percent) did not previously use any similar service, according to BetterCloud. And 70 percent of the Office 365 customers switched from Exchange, while 8 percent didn't use any other similar platform prior to their most recent deployment, the report says.

Perhaps most telling, however, is the number of companies that switched from Google for Work to Office 365; 13 percent of the organizations running Office 365 switched from Google for Work, while only 5 percent of the current Google for Work customers came from Office 365.

Organizations that use Google for Work are also more likely to be newly formed, and have fewer employees and smaller IT teams, according to BetterCloud. The average company size of a Google for Work customer is 120 employees, and their IT teams are composed of three people, on average, with a combined 20 years of experience.

Office 365 customers are typically older companies with more employees and larger IT teams. The average Office 365 customer employs 600 workers and has a 15-person IT team with a combined average of 30 years experience, according to BetterCloud.

The survey results also determined that 61 percent of organizations founded during the last two years were "born in the cloud," meaning they used cloud tools from the start, and 59 percent of the IT professionals said the structure and responsibilities of their teams changed during the same period.