Google Inc said more than 2 million businesses now use its online office software, and the Web search leader is going global on Monday with an advertising campaign to lure customers away from Microsoft Corp and IBM products.

The campaign, which starts Monday in countries including France, Japan and Britain, represents a rare foray by Google into mass-market advertising and underscores increasing competition to provide businesses with email and other office software.

While Microsoft and International Business Machines Corp dominate the market for enterprise email, Google is trying to convince businesses to switch to its so-called cloud-based services, in which software is accessed over the Internet and maintained at Google's data centers instead of on a company's computers.

Cloud-based services can provide cost and maintenance savings over traditional software, though recent high-profile outages -- including an outage of Google's Gmail last month -- have raised questions about the reliability of online software for business users.

Gartner analyst Tom Austin said most businesses will eventually switch to cloud-based email, but the process may take years. He noted IBM and Microsoft have introduced cloud products recently, and that Cisco Systems Inc appears to be preparing to offer its own cloud-based software.

On Thursday, Google CEO Eric Schmidt told investors during the company's quarterly earnings conference call he intended to boost investments in new business initiatives.

Google's Apps business -- which the company has said is profitable and generates hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue a year -- is a tiny portion of Google's overall business, which yielded almost $22 billion revenue last year.

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