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Analyst firm Telsyte is revealing a survey today that highlights Google Apps as officially overtaking IBM’s (News - Alert) Lotus Notes/Domino and Novell’s GroupWise platforms and is now the second go-to solution that Australian enterprises leverage after email hosting solution Microsoft Exchange.

In previous times, the three leaders in the email hosting space within this region were Microsoft, IBM and Novell (News - Alert), but lately Microsoft Exchange has gained traction and is increasing its user base by the day.

The findings were derived after polling nearly 330 local chief information officers and senior IT decision-makers in regards to what enterprise software they use and what capabilities they will like to access via their offering of choice. And according to respondents, although a majority of CIOs still remain a little scared to adopt a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS (News - Alert)) model, which is what Google Apps uses, users are much more enthusiastic about relocating their e-mail to the cloud.

“The search engine giant’s Apps suite is now second only to Microsoft’s Exchange for enterprise market penetration in Australia and is ahead of more established products like Novell’s GroupWise and IBM’s Lotus Notes,” the company said in a statement.

Rodney Gedda, senior analyst at the company which sponsored the survey, added that as more cloud-based email hosting providers enter the race for the most widely used product on the market it is only a matter of time before the market share away of on-premise applications depletes dramatically.

“The rise of Google (News - Alert) Apps – and now Microsoft’s Office 365 offering – has demonstrated how the SaaS delivery model can take on more established software vendors by offering an on-demand access to the application,” Gedda added.

Almost a month ago, it was revealed that Postini (News - Alert), which is an email hosting, Web security and archiving service owned by Google since 2007, will become part of Google Apps by 2013.

“In the past two years, we developed and released numerous Postini features directly in Google Apps such as user policy management, e-mail content filters, archiving, retention and eDiscovery with Google Apps Vault and many more,” Product Manager Adam Dawes commented. “As we look ahead to 2013, we’ll continue these feature integrations and gradually transition Postini Google Message Security (GMS (News - Alert)) and Google Message Discovery (GMD) customers to Google Apps. This will enable them to take advantage of the Postini features built directly into Google Apps that are more flexible, powerful and user-friendly.”

To read the full report, click here.

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