UPDATE on March 7th: Thanks to this comment below, I’ve discovered that Postini has now made two of the three options available for non-profits via web-based ordering!
I received an email response from my request for a sales rep regarding Postini at non-profit prices. Here’s what they (in specific, Peter from The Google Message Security Team) said, in part:
We don’t actually have the non-profit pricing available online at this time. We’re working on making the non-profit pricing available directly online. We don’t have a specific timeline for that, but definitely check back with us later!
If you would still like to move forward with the non-profit pricing right now, I can forward you along to one of our direct sales representatives if you are planning on making a purchase of $1,500 USD or more.
So basically, unless we’re over three times the size we are, we have to wait. This is going to leave a bunch of churches and other non-profits waiting out in the cold for an undetermined length of time. Education customers may, in general, have larger email user bases to qualify for direct sales, but that’s just my guess. I hope their non-specific timeline is shorter rather than longer; perhaps they’re working hard on it right now but don’t have it up since the change is such a new announcement. There’s just no way to know yet, given this response. A note of some sort to this effect would be appreciated on the pricing web page, but as much as I like them, Google will do what Google will do. I don’t think that’s going to change any time soon!
UPDATE the next day: My reply to Google went like this:
Thanks for the information and clarification. But you are still saying that if we are wanting to purchase a plan for less than $1500 we will need to wait for online availability, correct?
and Google Rep Peter’s reply was:
You’ve got it exactly. We’re making the $1,500 option available for people who are already planning on paying that much, or need the service deployed either right away, yesterday, or as soon as possible.
If that doesn’t fit your needs, I would recommend sitting tight while we get the Google Message Discovery online purchasing process up. We don’t have a set timeline for it, but it’s going to be sooner rather than later.
This is mostly good news. They aren’t committing to a date, but it seems to be coming soon. When it does, you can bet we’ll be jumping on it like a frog on a lily pad!
It looks like Google Postini is now available through online ordering only for “Message Filtering” and “Message Security” packages.
http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/security/education.html
The top package, “Message Discovery” includes email archiving and is not yet available to non-profits.
Here is the official update from Google:
—–Original Message—–
From: Google Message Security Team [mailto:message-security-sales@google.com]
Sent: Thursday, March 06, 2008 8:23 PM
To: Rob Shaw
Subject: [!! SPAM] [#249398631] Google Message Security and Compliance
Hello Rob,
My name is Peter, and I’m a Google Message Security and Compliance product specialist. Joe Murphy, one of our Google Search Appliance representatives forwarded me your information, and let me know that you were interested in Google Message Discovery. I know that you spoke to someone else in our Postini organization… I just wanted to let you know specifically what is
going on.
Google Message Discovery costs $25 per year per user. We are planning on making Google Message Discovery available for purchase online sooner rather than later, however at present it is available only through our
direct sales channel, with purchases of $1,500 or more. The 66% discount we have for non-profit educational institutions and US 501(c)(3) non-profits is currently available for purchases of $1500 or more as well.
For more information on Google Message Discovery, you might want to check out this link:
http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/security/index.html
In the meantime, feel free to let me know if you have any additional questions. I will definitely get back to you specifically when we have Google Message Discovery available online.
Best Regards,
Peter Griffin
The Google Message Security Team
650.214.4013
[…] to Rob Shaw from Greenwood Christian Church for commenting on my last post about Postini and letting me know that Google has released Postini at non-profit […]