Google Apps Now Used By 30 Million Employees

Google Apps is making some serious inroads into businesses and other organizations. Today, Google announced that more than 3 million businesses, schools, and government agencies are using Google Apps. To put that in perspective, that gives Google more enterprise customers than Salesforce, which has about 2 million.

There are now 30 million employees and other enterprise users on Google Apps, which is a bundle of Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar, Google Video, and Google Sites. Google Apps has grown by 5 million enterprise users since last March. Google sells it as an economical alternative to Microsoft Office and Exchange, with better sharing features since all the apps are based in the cloud.

The success of Google Apps is part of the growing consumerization of enterprise apps. Employees want their business apps to have a similar look and feel and the same ease-of-use as the consumer Internet apps they use every day. Google Enterprise president David Girouard will be joining us next week at TechCrunch Disrupt on a panel with Yammer CEO David Sacks and Charles River Ventures partner George Zachary, where I will ask them what is driving this consumerization of the enterprise (tickets).