We allow customers to mix and match storage plans: Google Workspace

Kelly Waldher, VP for Marketing at Google Workspace

Google rebranded its G Suite business offering as Google Workspace in October 2020, after experiencing growth and adoption at the start of the pandemic. The technology giant added over 2 million paid customers globally for this product from 2020 to 2022, taking its total paid user base to 8 million.

In June, Workspace introduced new pricing plans, scrapping a 100 GB upgrade plan that cost Rs 1,300 annually. The new pricing faced a backlash, especially from first-time cloud adopters and small businesses in price-sensitive markets like India.

One of the MSMEs which became vocal about it was an Ahmedabad-based firm Synersoft Technologies. The company’s CEO Vishal Shah in an open letter to Google India’s management, said that if he needed 130 GB for a few users, he was forced to upgrade each of the 50 accounts of his employees to a 2 TB storage plan at a 400 percent higher price.

Moneycontrol spoke to Kelly Waldher, vice president for marketing at Google Workspace, to understand the product and the new pricing structure. Waldher addressed some of these concerns over pricing for small businesses, the growth of G-Suite during the pandemic, and Workspace’s latest features. Edited excerpts:

Over the last two years, most organisations started their digital journeys and moved to the cloud. What was Google Workspace’s growth and adoption like globally and in India?

We now have over 8 million paying Google Workspace customers. That’s a global number. And the last time that we disclosed numbers, I think, was in the spring of 2020 and at that point, we had just over 6 million. So that gives you a sense, roughly in the last two years, since kind of in that pandemic period, we’ve added more than 2 million customers.

When you look at Google Meet in the Indian market, between the first quarter of 2020, kind of right before Covid was really happening, till the first quarter of 2021, a year later, we saw that the total time of our Indian user base spent on video calls increased by 45X. It was a massive explosion, if you will, in terms of usage of Google Meet.

Google is monetising products after two years of almost free services. What’s the strategy and approach?

When we launched Google Workspace in October of 2020, we also announced a new SKU (Stock Keeping Unit) line-up. So we essentially were stopping the sale of G Suite, the old SKUs, they call it old product, the old brand, in October 2020. And we introduced these new offerings on the commercial side.

At the highest level, we created a set of small and medium business (SMB) offerings. And those we basically call the business SKU family. And then we created a set of offers or SKUs that were targeted at enterprises. And we defined enterprises – as any company that wanted more than 300 licences. So high level two SKU families, small medium business, and enterprise.

In the case of the small medium businesses, we had three tailored SKUs that we made available. G Suite Basic, which was our entry-level paid SKU, was priced at $6. In Workspace, the new entry-level SKU was priced at $6. So the price didn’t change. Most of the primary features in terms of storage and capabilities were very, very similar... Then we introduced the Business Standard offer, which was $12. And then Business Plus, which was $18.

But for small businesses that were looking to get started with Google, we kept that opening price point the same in US dollars. Again, I recognise that there are regional differences and currencies and you know, FX rates.

But the strategy was to acknowledge that small medium businesses have different needs, in many cases, mostly around their IT capabilities. Most small businesses don’t have big dedicated IT staff. So what they’re looking for in terms of ease of use, support, some of the more advanced compliance and reporting capabilities, they’re just different from those enterprises. That was part one of the strategy – to better meet the needs of these two different segments.

Part two was to keep the entry-level price very consistent and create more options to grow within that small business family that would be going from Business Starter to Business Standard and Business Standard to Business Plus.

MSMEs here claim that after the 100 GB plan was removed, if certain senior management members needed more storage, the entire team needed to upgrade to 2 TB per person, which is costlier. How is this playing out in price sensitive markets such as India?

I’m not sure if there is some misinformation, but we do allow the ability to mix and match offers. I don’t know what people are telling you or what you’re hearing.

Let’s just say that there are 20 people in a small business. And if they want to put 10 people on Starter, five people on Standard and five people on Plus, they are allowed to do that. The intent is not to say, well, you have one user that is over that 30 GB and they used to be able to go to 100 GB, now they have to go to 2 terabytes. That’s not the intent.

The intent is to be able to allow the user to map to their needs and allow mixing and matching of Starter, Standard and Plus, that’s the first point.

What we don’t allow, though, is if you want to mix and match across the business and the enterprise plan – that’s where we don’t allow the mixing and matching. If you want to go to enterprise, then you need to move your organisation to enterprise.

But that has more to do with, like the support that you get, and some of the reporting, those things are happening at a company level. So that’s the only place where you kind of have to move everybody in it.

Some MSMEs have shared screenshots of chats with Google’s customer service, which say that if two of a 10-member team want to upgrade to the larger 2 TB plan, the rest must also upgrade. Is that so?

I’m happy to follow up with specifics, but that is not the intent. You’re supposed to be able to mix and match. That’s how those SKUs were designed. As long as when you add them all up there are 300 or less users, then you can stay in that business SKU family.

One other thing I wanted to make sure that I provided clarity on is the model that we’re moving to with storage – pooled storage. So with G Suite, and today with Workspace, each user is assigned a certain amount of storage, but that can't be shared. So, if you get 30 GB, you can’t say you’re going to use 10 and give 20 to your colleague.

Where we’re going is to allow an organisation to essentially get credits for each one of their users and then pool that storage across the organisation. So that the administrator can say, well, Kelly uses a lot of storage, so we’re going to give him 60 and this person over here uses only five.

So as we roll out and move to pooled storage, there’s even more flexibility for companies to get the most out of their storage. When you add up those two things – the ability to mix and match and pool your storage – this should be a very customer-friendly approach to storage.