Google Apps had a lot of buzz surrounding it in the best of times. But now that the economy has turned, the amount of actual Google Apps momentum in the enterprise is now incredibly high.

In a Migrating from Microsoft Exchange to Google Apps webinar sponsored by Google, the IT leadership of Morgans Hotel Group explains the reasons why they just recently converted from Microsoft Exchange to Google Apps.

Jason Harper, vice president of worldwide operations at Morgans Hotel Group, says the key issues that his IT organization faced were decreasing budgets, aging hardware systems, lack of internal expertise, limited bandwidth, not enough time to deal with all the patches and upgrades that Microsoft issues, expenses associated with add-on applications for Microsoft Exchange, and a tough time justifying the disaster recovery infrastructure required to keep Microsoft Exchange running.

Harper says his organization considered hosted alternatives to Microsoft Exchange, but found then to be still too expensive and cumbersome to deploy and manage.

Nicholas Hatch, director of IT operations for the hotel, goes on to describe the IT organizations general approach to rolling out GoogleApps to the hotel’s 1,700 end users.

Rating: Succinctly lays out the issues driving thousands of customers away from Microsoft Exchange – TWM1