Monday, May 11, 2009
Do your most strategic apps belong in the cloud?
Balakrishna Narasimhan
I've been in a number of conversations over the past few weeks where I've been asked which business processes or apps belong in the cloud. There are obviously some technical considerations, but I'd like to focus on the strategic reasons for making the decision and how things have changed in the shift from traditional IT architectures to IT in the cloud.
Traditional IT department
In the past, the only way for a company to maintain control of their business process was to completely own the technology supporting the process. The rationale was that a company's most strategic, differentiating processes are unique and therefore have to built by the company either from scratch or by heavily customizing packaged applications. This also meant owning the entire technology stack supporting the process and the application. So, while the intent was to create differentiated processes that were agile and differentiating, the reality has become that the technology stack is an albatross around the IT team's neck that prevents them from moving as quickly and as efficiently as they would like to.
The result is that while IT organizations are keen to support the business, they are unable to go much beyond providing basic services. The solution to the problem of managing the entire stack was traditionally either hosted/managed server services or outsourcing, but each introduces its own problems.
Outsourcing
In the case of outsourcing, the enterprise gains cost savings but relinquishes control of their business process and has to adhere to the provider's "best-practice" process. This clearly means that outsourcing can only be applied to commodity processes rather than any differentiating processes or processes where innovation is needed. The IT team's role shifts to primarily vendor management with little ability to innovate or drive the business.
Hosted/Managed Servers
Hosting gets a bit closer to solving the problem because it reduces some of the IT team's pain in terms of managing infrastructure. However, the IT team still needs to spend a lot of their time maintaining the application and the middleware stack, i.e., applying patches and bug fixes, implementing upgrades, maintaining integrations, etc. In addition, the team also needs to manage their relationship with the hosting vendor. So, again, the main impact is some cost savings but no real gains in terms of agility or ability to innovate or support the business.
IT department in the cloud
Cloud computing changes the decision process completely. No longer do companies face a choice between relinquishing all control of their business process for cost savings or dealing with the high costs and complexity of supporting an entire software stack.
Platforms like Force.com and Google App Engine give companies a way to control the parts of the stack that matter most, the application and business process layer and abstract away the management of the infrastructure. This means that the IT team can focus their energies on driving innovation and supporting the business.
A real-life example
In a past life, I was a partner at a major management consulting firm. Since our business was our people, we believed strongly that our most critical processes were those that were related to managing our people, e.g., recruiting, employee performance management, compensation, project management, project staffing, etc. The technology supporting many of these processes is available from outsourcers but we couldn't even consider those offerings because our processes were absolutely unique and core to our business. The result was the that we spent significant amounts of money maintaining a brittle IT infrastructure that was great at running the business in a static state, but was difficult to adapt as we changed our business model, made acquisitions or entered new markets.
Fast forward to today at Appirio. We run our entire business in the cloud. A core part of our business is delivering professional services to our 150+ enterprise customers (and products to over 2500 companies). We manage all aspects of our professional services business in a custom application running on Salesforce's Force.com platform. The application is completely customized to our unique processes but runs in the cloud. Therefore, we can quickly adapt the application as new needs arise and not worry about maintaining servers or managing infrastructure. With no intervention from us on the infrastructure side, the application has supported our four-fold growth over the past year. In addition, as we make changes to our internal organization structure or introduce new products or service offerings, we can make changes almost instantly. Our IT costs less than a third of industry benchmarks AND we can run a better, more agile business.
That's why we believe that over time, companies should move not only their non-core processes but also their most strategic processes to the cloud!
Labels: CloudComputing, Force.com, Google Apps, PaaS, SaaS
Wednesday, January 07, 2009
2009 Prediction: Google doubles down on the Enterprise
#3 in our series of 2009 predictions
2008 Recap
2008 was a fantastic year for Google's enterprise apps. They successfully made the transition from something small companies might dabble with to apps that large corporations rely on. In 2008, large corporations like Genentech and government organizations like DC government successfully made the transition to Google apps and became public advocates.2008 was also a year of great innovation for the rest of Google's enterprise-relevant technology, with the introduction of their App Engine development platform, great new APIs like the visualization API and significant new features like adding video to Gtalk. Google also got serious about becoming part of the enterprise application ecosystem. They did this through integrations between Google Apps and Salesforce.com in April, and integration between App Engine and Force.com, late in the year.
2009 Prediction
We believe that 2008 was an inflection point in Google's adoption in the enterprise, particularly for mail and calendar. Google will double down on the enterprise in 2009 and see massive adoption. We believe this will be driven by 4 things.Google continues to demonstrate commitment to the Enterprise
Google has publicly highlighted the enterprise as a strategic area in 2009. They have also made concrete moves to address enterprise needs, including obtaining SAS-70 certification, integrating with Enterprise class clouds like Salesforce and providing SLAs. We expect this to continue and accelerate in 2009 with expanded offline access, greater support for enterprise-class programming languages and more. Google's mission is to organize the world's information. Much of that information is generated as we all go about our daily jobs-- those who suggest that Google isn't serious about the enterprise have too narrow a view of their ambition.
Economic conditions drive evaluation of alternatives to Office/Exchange
Companies everywhere are re-evaluating their budget in the light of the stormy economy. In this environment, companies are scrutinizing all spend, particularly spending on non-strategic activities. Mail and Collaboration software, while necessary, require a disproportionate effort and cost for most IT departments. CIOs, who will be under pressure to do more with less, will be more open to evaluating alternatives to Exchange and Sharepoint. Forrester recently released a report titled "Should your email live in the cloud?" (More detail from RWW). The answer for nearly all companies was an unequivocal "YES."
Enterprise references establish Google as a viable alternative
Google adoption and endorsement by the Genentechs and DC Govts of the world are changing the way CIOs think about Google apps. They're no longer a curiosity but a viable alternative to Exchange. We've seen this shift over the course of the year in our own client base. Earlier in the year, questions were raised about about whether Google's corporate culture is really "enterprise ready." We stand by our assertion that it is the culture of traditional IT vendors that is no longer fit for the enterprise.... and predict that more and more of the world's largest companies will agree with us.
Google apps functionality leapfrogs Exchange
One of the barriers to Google apps adoption has been companies fearing that their users will have to adjust to a lower level of functionality because of the shift to Google apps. While this might've been true in the past, Google has not only closed the gap but actually provides a superior experience for core messaging. A few key advantages are large mailboxes (10s of Gigabytes per user), the ability to search all messages using Google's fantastic search capabilities, native iPhone/Blackberry access and integrated chat/video chat. And these features are available instantaneously: when Google introduced video chat, our clients started using it that same day. In an on-premise world, this would've required upgrades to each instance of the software before it was available to all users at the company.
Implications for Customers
Google apps are here to stay and are a viable, potentially superior alternative to Microsoft Office/Exchange. However, there are two important caveats. First, Google Apps, while sufficient for the needs of 80% of a company's business users, will likely not completely replace Microsoft Office, especially Excel and Powerpoint. Here at Appirio, we continue to use Office for a lot of our document creation, but then move documents to Google Apps to share, revise, and present (instead of using email and GoToMeeting).
What do you think?
Which of our predictions do you agree or disagree with? Please let us know by voting in our poll or commenting below.
Labels: 2009-Predictions, Google, Google Apps, Google Bootcamp, Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft Office, Microsoft Sharepoint, remove, Salesforce for Google Apps, Software as a Service
Monday, December 08, 2008
Force.com for Google App Engine: Apps "Native" to a Cloud Community
2. Force.com checkout is a natural extension of Salesforce's strategy to encourage "Native" Apps. Salesforce rightly argues that there’s something unique about applications that run entirely on Force.com. Force.com is a powerful, trusted platform, and there’s a confidence that customers can have in applications that rely on that technology. That’s why Appirio has built dozens of custom applications for our customers entirely on Force.com, offers several 100% native apps, and strives to have all of our products that interact with Salesforce run native functionality.
Here's the power of the Salesforce platform strategy: Salesforce customers can now have the best of both worlds. Salesforce is combining the strengths of multiple, complementary, on-demand platforms, delivered through applications that customers can trust.
- Force.com excels at modeling business processes, workflow and UI
- Google excels at scalable, consumer-focused applications that extend its strengths in communication, collaboration, search, and advertising
- Amazon excels at highly scalable low-level computing power and storage
- Facebook excels at viral applications that leverage a user’s social graph and its community of 120M+ participants
Labels: Amazon Web Services, AppExchange, Cloud Computing, facebook, Force.com, Google, Google Apps, Microsoft Azure, On Demand, PaaS, SaaS, salesforce.com
Friday, November 21, 2008
What IS the "Hidden" Cost of Google Apps?
- Create a Cname record, and train users to go to "mail.blumsday.com" for email. It is much more intuitive than "www.google.com/a/blumsday.com/
mail" - Spend some time and train your users. If all of your employees are spending 30 mins a day, it won't take much effort to improve their efficiency and your ROI by delivering a training class or two. Poll your users on what their issues are and address them...stop making them frustrated and unproductive!
- Create help desk procedures. Treat Google Apps support just as seriously as you would any installed software support issues.
Labels: Cloud Computing, Google, Google Apps, Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft Office, Software as a Service, Video Chat
Monday, November 17, 2008
Microsoft and On-premise - Billions of Dollars Behind Google and Growing?
Narinder Singh
1. Microsoft would have to build and test it - Given all the different versions of their software, hardware, OS combinations facing Microsoft, they would have to make some very tough choices or severely limit the options they supported. Given the precedent of Vista compatibility, this enormity of this can not be underestimated. Conservatively, it would take them more than 10x the effort for Google to do the same thing within Exchange.
2. Customers would have to then get the new version and upgrade all Exchange instances - With Google, it basically was a couple clicks and it worked. For Exchange / Outlook customers they would have to upgrade or install completely new software. If they wanted to chat with those outside their company, they would have to hope those folks had also upgraded.
With an estimated 500M Outlook users, lets assume that the fully loaded cost of the upgrade (license, support, rollout on the server and to each client) will be just $10 per user (an incredibly conservative number in our opinion). That means it would cost businesses at least $5 billion to gain the functionality Google just rolled out in a day. The likely case is that this would also take years to take hold, severely limiting the benefits because not everyone was on the same version immediately. You would have to wait for your friends company's to rollout the "new version" so that you could video chat cross company (or naively hope that Microsoft actually built it using a standards based approach).
3. They would have to fix security and synchronization problems - What major new capability released from Microsoft doesn't create new security holes? Lets say that 500M users represented 5M companies each of whom had to spend an additional $1000 (1-2 days over a year) to deal with the security patches, and the subsequent synchronization to OS, SQL Server, Exchange version, that would be needed. That's another $5 billion down the tubes. For Google, even when problems do arise, they are fixed by Google, once, for all customers (without the customer having to take any action).
At a recent private event of medium size enterprise CIOs, one of the most senior Microsoft executives was left struggling to explain why a company should continue to invest in Exchange when Google was providing a broader (and growing) set of capabilities for 1-2 orders of magnitude less expense than Microsoft (Google Apps for mail, calendar, chat, docs, and sites lists for $50/user/year). The realities of attempting to preserve revenues from a legacy solution while promoting the new model is too much inner conflict for even Microsoft to wade through. As we have said before, the most likely path for company's like Microsoft to "transition to the cloud" is to set up an independent unit that can compete freely with their own solutions.
In the last year, Google has added more innovation to the messaging and collaboration space than Microsoft has in the last decade. To do this at a fraction of the cost for themselves and customers highlights the radical difference and inherent conflicts in on-premise vs. on-demand. With the current economic conditions, we expect to see a large set of studies and research that drill home the simple fact that real multi-tenant SaaS/PaaS solutions deliver much more value for a dramatically lower cost for both the provider and consumer. IT is simply too important and too costly to be left with solutions of a pre-Internet world.
Labels: Cloud Computing, Google Apps, Innovation, Microsoft Azure, SaaS, Video Chat
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
What's Different About Appirio's Google Apps Bootcamp?
Its one week before Appirio's free Google Apps Bootcamp, a little experiment we're doing with our partners at Google to hone in on the most effective way to get companies up and running on Google Apps.
Why are we calling an event over breakfast at the W a "bootcamp"? Mostly to distinguish it from the vendor-sponsored events that we've all been to, and all think are a waste of time.
Here's what's going to be different:
| Traditional marketing event | Appirio's Bootcamp Approach |
| 1 day event: You come, have some bad coffee, listen to the presentations, go home-- end of event. | Ongoing experience: You're experience will start right after registration when we invite you to the Bootcamp wiki (powered by Google Sites, of course). And your experience will continue on the wiki afterwards as you continue to engage in the community and content. |
| Goal is a big sales: Wear your budget on your sleeve, because that's how you're going to get the attention of the vendors and get your questions answered | Goal is a pilot: It may sound corny, but we really do think that Google Apps sells itself once an organization starts using it. So our goal is for you to take that first step: pick a part of the portfolio and a part of your organization to get started |
| Meant to woo buyers: Wear your title on your sleeve, because if you can't sign a PO, you wont get much attention. | Meant to build advocates: Google Apps makes its way into the enterprise from multiple angles-- our goal is to turn people who are interested in this technology into advocates who are empowered to make Google Apps a reality in their organization, regardless of their title. |
| Presentation of features: Long presentations by product marketing teams eager to differentiate their new offering from what they showed you last year. | Experience of the offering: You'll be using Google Apps directly throughout the event, and hearing the good AND the bad of real world deployments directly from customers. |
| Eyes on blackberry: Show up, tune out, and eying your blackberry. No reason to stay engaged. | Hands on keyboard: We can't achieve the above if you're sitting back in your seat. So you'll be expected to bring your laptop, get on the wireless, and participate. Google Apps will be powering our entire event, so participation equals education. |
Will it work? We're not sure-- but we invite you to come and join the experience. If you'll be in San Francisco on the morning of October 1, join us for breakfast at the W and participate in our "bootcamp" for Google Apps... a non-traditional approach to build advocates for a non-traditional offering.
Reserve your spot now for this free event
Date: October 1, 2008
Location: W Hotel (map)
Time: 8:30am - 11:00am
Cost: Free!
Labels: Google Apps, Google Bootcamp, Google Sites
Saturday, September 06, 2008
The "Grand Old Party" Gets the New Way of Computing
Labels: Force.com, Google Apps, salesforce.com, Software as a Service
Wednesday, July 09, 2008
Microsoft to Partners: We Still Don't Get SaaS
Chris Barbin
The on-premise titans trying to transition to on-demand face considerable challenges, well-documented in this blog and elsewhere. One of the most significant mistakes companies make trying to transition is pursuing a "hybrid" strategy. We've watched SAP and Oracle stumble into all sorts of problems trying to seek the middle ground, and now it seems Microsoft wants to join the party. Recently we were invited to listen to Microsoft's new CRM pitch , designed to recruit existing Salesforce.com partners. The pitch centers on a benign-sounding notion, the "power of choice" (see screenshot at left). Microsoft's lack of a choice (on-premise vs. SaaS) is the core issue. Choice when used in the context of technology architecture typically points to a vendor with a conflicted or transitional strategy. They're not quite ready to make the full commitment, so they spread their attention, development, marketing, and operations resources across fundamentally different paradigms.
What is deemed a choice actually represents a company trying to provide two conflicted models. Would you expect the company who sold you a backyard well to be able to offer a water utility? Would you expect the company who sold you a diesel generator to be able to offer you the benefits of a utility company? Nick Carr did a good job exploding the general myth of "choice" as an alternative to "progress" in The Big Switch, where he extends the electricity analogy to the current age of IT technologies.
We recently blogged, and were quoted in eWeek, saying that companies like Microsoft build "physically and emotionally closed solutions." This makes them unable to meet the challenges of tomorrow's enterprises.
A sign of this and that a company doesn't get SaaS is when it positions on-demand as a transition path to on-premise. This usually means:
- They are trying to not completely freak out their sales and management teams with the notion that their SaaS offering will cannibalize their traditional software.
- Their SaaS feature set is way behind their current on-premise product.
- They don't want a customer to think they made the wrong choice in selecting their on-premise product last year.
- They still don't get what SaaS means for their products, sales, operations and culture.
Microsoft was so brazen as to promote a financial incentive for partners who help customers move from on-demand to on-premise. Microsoft evidently considers this customer ripoff to be an "Opportunity for Success" for its partners (see second screenshot).
Again, the analogy to other utilities is useful: if a company tried to sell you the benefits of their electric or water grid as a "transition" to a bigger and better backyard well and generator, you'd have reason to question their commitment and ability to deliver the promised utility.
What could be more illustrative of this than Microsoft's attempts to put thin web front ends on on-premise solutions? Look at the screenshot below. This solution is really nothing more than diesel generator hooked up to a electric grid and pretending to be a utility (although this solution is apparently good enough for some other companies 'committed' to on-demand). At best this type of solutions is a stop gap measure; more likely, it demonstrates a lack of understanding for what is required to deliver SaaS to tomorrow's enterprise.
Labels: Google Apps, Microsoft Exchange, on-demand, oracle, SaaS, SAP
Monday, June 23, 2008
Google and salesforce.com - Like Peanut Butter and Jelly
Jason Ouellette
Today, salesforce.com and Google announced a new toolkit to link Force.com applications to Google Apps. Now, Appirio already has five commercial applications that connect Google Apps and Salesforce.com. That's more than any other vendor, and three of our apps - Calendar Sync, CRM Dashboards, and Doc Search - rank in the top ten of all AppExchange downloads.
In the "old world" of on-premise software, this new toolkit might be viewed as a threat to Appirio's product portfolio. If any developer can now easily link up Salesforce.com and Google Apps, who needs Appirio's products?
In truth, though, we think it's great. Appirio was involved in early usage and validation of the new toolkit. We embedded it into a cool new Visualforce demo that will be shown in the keynote address of today's Tour De Force event in Santa Clara, and augmented our current product offerings with it. Our viewpoint is that basic connectivity does not, by itself, hold intrinsic value, but it's an essential ingredient in creating value.
My former employer, webMethods, made hundreds of millions of dollars essentially by connecting SAP and other ERP systems to one another, sitting on top of the basic connectivity provided by the vendors. By providing this toolkit, salesforce.com and Google will make it easier for innovators to build new and powerful business scenarios that weren't possible before.
With just a few lines of code - six, to be precise - we were able to bring Google calendar data onto a custom Visualforce page (view demo).
We're seeing lots of steps towards integrating the cloud. Salesforce orgs can now connect to one another, via S2S, announced earlier this year. Appirio connected salesforce.com with Amazon S3 via our Appirio Cloud Storage product. In the on-premise world, ubiquitous connectivity really wasn't possible. But in the SaaS world, on the Internet, information can be connected in a scalable way, allowing even small ISVs to create commercial-grade innovative solutions. We hope other vendors' SaaS platforms, either directly or through partners like Appirio, will bake in basic connectivity to one another. This lets us focus on solving problems that have vexed developers in the enterprise for years.
The rapidly increasing web of links among major SaaS vendors is starting to create a business-specific version of the "World Wide Computer" Nick Carr talks about in The Big Switch. If all of your business applications, living in the cloud, could freely collaborate, their collective intelligence would begin to outstrip what any single system could deliver.
Labels: API, GData, Google, Google Apps, salesforce.com
Tuesday, June 03, 2008
Adobe Embraces the Cloud - Hazy Days Ahead for Microsoft?
Labels: Acrobat.com, Adobe, Google Apps, Microsoft Office, SaaS
Thursday, May 29, 2008
Connecting the Cloud, One Contact at a Time
Ryan Nichols
Most businesses ultimately depend on personal connections. Business people would be lost if they couldn’t connect everyday with the contacts in their address book. And businesses wouldn’t function without the rich web of connections among their employees, partners, suppliers, and customers. But your company’s contact database is almost certainly incomplete. Despite periodic reminders from management to “scan those business cards” and “import those contacts,” most people can't find the time to maintain this information unless they are forced to, regardless of the benefits to the company. Your personal address book is also incomplete. Sure, you may have a rich virtual rolodex of names, mobile phones, and email addresses, but you can't see how this person is related to your business right now.
- Imagine you’re writing a casual email to reconnect with a former colleague—who happens to be in the midst of making a big purchase with another department in your company. What if you had this sort of business context at your fingertips whenever you communicated?
- Now imagine that your company’s sales reps knew about this connection as they were putting together their proposal. You would have been happy to make an introduction—if they’d only known to ask.
As with our other offerings, we’re starting with simple synchronization—you choose which of your contacts you want to share, and how you want them synchronized between your Google and Salesforce address books. This is a valuable start. Today, your Google email account automatically stores the email address of everyone you’ve ever written to, but knows nothing about their companis or roles. Your Salesforce.com contacts are detailed, but you’re missing hundreds of critical business connections. Synchronizing the two solves a real pain point that we hear from our customers today.
Contacts in Context
Sync is just the beginning. Appirio's vision is to bring the business context from all of a company’s on-demand enterprise applications into the productivity tools and social networks that individuals use as they work. We want "Solutions for Business" + "Solutions for People" to finally create "Solutions for Business People."
Contacts is the center of that vision, and sync between Google Apps and Salesforce is a great place to start. Enjoy the offering!
Labels: AppExchange, appirio, Google, Google Apps, on-demand, SaaS, SaaS integration, Salesforce for Google Apps, salesforce.com
Sunday, April 13, 2008
Google and salesforce.com : Solutions for business, meet solutions for businesspeople
Ryan Nichols
Salesforce, meet Google Apps… this is an introduction we’re happy to make and an occasion we are excited to be a part of. As the first partner of both Google Enterprise and salesforce.com, Appirio is excited to see these two leaders in on-demand solutions come together to change the way that business is done.
Salesforce has revolutionized software for business. Their on-demand solutions for business have changed what it means to develop, deploy, customize, and use a business solution. Google has revolutionized software for business people. Their on-demand solutions for business people have un-chained us from our desktop productivity applications and changed the way that business people interact with information and with each other.
The technology of their joint offering is exciting enough: Use Gmail and Gtalk directly from Salesforce. Find and add Google Docs as you work in Salesforce. Synchronize your Google Calendar and your Salesforce Calendar. Create Google Gadgets from your CRM data. We’ve been working closely with our partners at salesforce.com and Google to make much of this possible.
But what gets us excited is how we plan on using this technology to impact the business of our customers. Bringing Salesforce and Google Apps together solves one of the biggest pain points companies have today—the gap between the tools that businesses need to run and the tools that people use to work.
Businesses suffer when the tools that support these two types of activities aren’t connected. First, of course, is the cost in productivity and efficiency—everyone has experienced how much time is wasted copying, pasting, importing, exporting, and plain old retyping to bridge these different tool sets.
But the real cost is misalignment. When the communication and collaboration of business people occurs without the context of business information, or when a business process occurs without the context of communication and collaboration, the outcome is certain: poor decisions, poorly executed.
Traditional enterprise software companies have failed to bridge this gap. The excitement around each new announcement between a traditional provider of solutions for business (e.g., SAP) and a traditional provider of solutions for business people (e.g., Microsoft) quickly fades to disappointment and failed expectations. This failure is inevitable because on-premise software is too inflexible to bridge this gap. The simple fact that enterprises would have to spend tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to upgrade to recent versions of SAP and Microsoft before thinking about joint solutions dooms the effort.
On-Demand changes all of this...again.
Today’s announcement and the future
On-demand solutions offer the potential to finally the bridge the gap between the tools that businesses need to run and the tools that people use to get things done. That’s what makes today’s announcement so exciting. Building on the platform salesforce and Google are providing, Appirio is delivering four new products that allow Salesforce and Google users to easily synchronize calendars, collaborate on marketing campaigns, find and embed documents, and create and share customized CRM dashboards. In addition, we have expanded our services for Google and salesforce customers to leverage these new offerings.
At Appirio, we’re already using Google and Salesforce together to change how our customers do business:
- Helping account teams collaborate in the context of their customer information in Google Documents and Sites
- Helping marketing teams coordinate their campaign timelines using Google Calendar
- Helping service and support teams leverage a knowledge base of their collective experience, captured in Google Documents and Sites
Over the past several months, we have helped numerous customers, including salesforce.com, benefit from Google Apps. Creating products and services to bring Google and Salesforce together in the enterprise provides Appirio a unique perspective. We believe that on-demand offers a way for providers like salesforce.com, Google, and Appirio to create compelling solutions for customers that cannot be matched by the rigidity of the on-premise approach. While this future may take time to reach all parts of the market, we believe it is inevitable and every enterprise needs to find a path to that future. We look forward to doing our part to help....
Labels: Google Apps, SaaS, salesforce, Salesforce for Google Apps
Friday, March 14, 2008
The SaaS Fight for the Enterprise Continues - Google Antes Up (Again)
Tony Bianco
The SaaS Fight for the Enterprise Continues - Google Antes Up (Again)
Google continued to make its run at the enterprise last week, following up the splashy Google Sites launch with the quieter introduction of some new tools and APIs for Google Apps. These include a new tool that will enable two-way syncing between Google Calendar and Microsoft Outlook, as well as a new Google Contacts Data API that provides secure, programmatic access to contacts in a Google address book. This enables developers to access and share contacts between different applications (e.g. social networking sites, contact managers), without providing full access to a user's Google account. There is a great Wired blog on why this is so important.
If You Build It They Will Come
This closes an important gap in Google's API coverage for Apps, and like the introduction of Google Sites last week, should increase enterprise interest in Google Apps. Not that they need much help. Google already has over 500,000 businesses using Google Apps and claims to add over 2,000 businesses each day. This easily puts them at over a million users and growing rapidly.
This kind of growth shows that customers are becoming much more comfortable moving their email, calendar, contacts and documents to the cloud. It's enough to motivate traditional software juggernauts like Microsoft and IBM to sit up, take notice and react. Last week Microsoft continued their dance toward their version of SaaS, which they call "software plus services," with a beta version of a Microsoft-hosted SharePoint and Exchange.
With all the recent SaaS talk from traditional on-premise vendors, it'll be interesting to watch the battle. We believe Google has a head start for a few reasons.
- Google makes it easy for their applications to work with other systems - the new Calendar Sync tool and Contacts API are great examples of this. Google also makes it extremely simple to migrate data over from existing applications, which is critically important for enterprises.
- Google is focused solely on the SaaS model and they are well aware of the requirements to make that model work. As we've said in the past, vendors that try to split their focus between on-premise and on-demand will have a difficult time succeeding without making significant changes to the way they develop and sell their products, and how they service their customers. This is a difficult task for those who must protect existing on-premise cash cows.
- Google has made it clear that they're investing heavily in this area with new services like Google Sites and recent acquisitions like Postini. Most importantly, they have the resources and the experience to make it successful. With the rate of innovation coming from Google, we're sure competitors will need to stay on their toes.
Labels: Google, Google Apps, Lotus Notes, Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft Sharepoint, SaaS
