Excel Micro Offering Customers Tablets for Google Apps Moves

For the rest of July, cloud distributor Excel Micro is giving customers who jump to Google Apps for Business an extra incentive in the form of a free Motorola Xoom Android tablet. The promotion is designed to get fence-sitters to give Google Apps a shot, according to Excel Micro.

Some fine print on the  promotion, which has already been running for a week: That free Xoom tablet – which comes equipped with 1GHz processor and 32GB of memory – is only for customers who purchase 100 or more Google Apps for Business licenses. However, 75, 50 and 25 licenses gets you a free $400, $250 or $100 Amazon Gift Card, respectively, according to the press release.

Here’s what Joseph Vaccone, president and CEO of Excel Micro, had to say about the “It Pays To Go Google!” program in a prepared statement:

It’s true the Motorola Xoom as a Google Android tablet is probably one of the better ways to show off the mobility options the Google Apps cloud suite affords users. But that doesn’t change the fact that it’s really just a deal-sweetener for Excel Micro.

For Excel Micro’s part, it doesn’t just offer customers the Google Apps for Business product alone – the distributor is something of a specialist when it comes to deployment, integration, archiving and other professional services around Google’s cloud. That means a $499 Android tablet is a no-brainer as a giveaway for 100 seats’ worth of Google Apps software and services.

While not every Google Apps Authorized Reseller has that kind of leeway with its balance sheet, I’m wondering whether this kind of approach isn’t something more cloud service providers should try out. It could give them an edge in the fight against Microsoft Office 365.