Google launched Google Apps Premier Edition in February 2007, and we have seen an incredible rate of market adoption, including more than 400,000 businesses and millions of users. We are signing up over 1,500 businesses per day on the Google Apps platform. And let's not forget that Google Inc. itself is running its company of 20,000+ employees on Google Apps.

Our customers continue to find that Google Apps Premier Edition is a great alternative of a hosted solution to other alternate on-premise solutions, such as Microsoft® Exchange. Here are some of their reasons why:

• Lower cost: Google delivers Google Apps to your business over the Web at a fraction of the cost of installed systems. This means that Google Apps can provide a significantly lower total cost of ownership (TCO). Mailbox redundancy, infrastructure upgrades and infrastructure scaling are all handled behind the scenes by Google, so your business doesn't need to budget time and money for these projects.
• Higher quality: Google Apps offers superior security, reliability, and storage space than most organizations can accomplish with an on-premises solution.
• Improved usability: Google Apps provides the simple, intuitive interface so that there's minimal training resources involved for end-users.
• Leader in Innovation: Google continues to demonstrate its industry leadership in terms of web-based innovation. Driving this platform forward, we have the leading computing platform and have assembled one of the strongest teams of computer scientists in the industry. As a Premier Edition customer you get to experience that innovation first-hand as product enhancements are rolled out on a regular basis.

To help your business make the switch to Google Apps easier, we've enabled a smooth IMAP migration from other platforms to Google Apps; this allows administrators to migrate a handful or a few thousand user mailboxes from an existing mail system to corresponding Google Apps mail accounts. We currently support migration from Microsoft® Exchange Server 2003, Cyrus IMAP Server, Courier-IMAP, and Dovecot via the IMAP protocol. IMAP migration is only available in the Premier Edition.