Google said that international auto parts supplier Valeo will deploy Google Apps across its 30,000-member workforce.

In a blog post, Laurent Guiraud, from Google's enterprise group, characterized the customer conversion as a vote for the efficiencies of cloud computing.

"Today, more than a million businesses have moved beyond traditional software and hardware to cloud computing -- where data and applications live online -- and they're using the Google Apps suite not just for Gmail, but also for shared calendaring, collaborating on files without attachments, private video sharing, and quickly deployable internal and external sites," he said. "IT managers are refocusing the money and time saved towards core projects that help their individual businesses become more competitive."

Andre Gold, Valeo's technical senior VP, in a statement described his company's conversion to Google Apps as a way to reduce its office infrastructure costs while improving user collaboration and productivity. The company consists of 193 entities in 27 countries, which suggests some fairly formidable barriers to collaboration.

Google on Wednesday also published the musings of "guest blogger" Louis Gary, manager of client services in the information services department at Hamilton Beach Brands.

Gary's blog post tells the tale of his company's conversion from Lotus Notes/Domino to Google Apps, the sort of uplifting customer success story that marketing departments cherish.

Matt Brown, an analyst for Forrester Research, observes that cloud computing is not a done deal as far as most organizations are concerned. "In terms of corporate adoption, I see a lot more evaluations and interest in cloud computing than I see actual contracts getting done," he said. "There are a number of inhibitors that will prevent it from catching on in a mainstream way for a little while."

He predicts the cloud computing paradigm will take another five years before it's widely adopted. The reason, he said, is that there's still a lot of resistance from IT professionals about security, privacy, and legal requirements. He points out that many companies are regulated by laws that restrict where they can store data or that require verification of how data is stored.

"Google has not done a good job at all at providing inspection rights for its infrastructure," he said, adding, "They are in a bit of a Catch-22. They're not trying to hide anything, but there are security reasons why they wouldn't want every company coming in and looking at everything."

He credits Google with riding the wave of technological populism, which has forced IT departments to consider cloud applications like Google Apps. But he says that competitors like Microsoft and IBM appear to be in a better position to address the enterprise market than Google, at least at the moment.

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