Friday, May 29, 2009
Google Wave for the Enterprise
- Project Waves: Bridge the gap between your under-used project wiki page and the day-to-day email and IM traffic among the project team. Get new project team members up to speed quickly by having them "playback" the critical waves in the project workspace.
- Sales Waves: Collaborate on deals in an environment rich with context from your CRM system, embedded as gadgets within the wave. Turn everyone in your company into a member of a virtual account team that contributes ideas on how to do more business with your most important accounts.
- Support Waves: Stop endless loops of customer support email. Engage your customers in a wave that evolves as their needs change. Resolve their issue faster, and create reusable waves for customers with similar problems.
Tuesday, April 07, 2009
Google's Campfire for App Engine Warms the Cloud Ecosystem
Bottom line? We were impressed with the capabilities of the platform, and look forward to using Google App Engine to help our customers do more with the cloud.
- Oracle's Social CRM VP showed us Google gadgets operating with on-premise Siebel data. Remember that this very same functionality was demonstrated almost two years ago (by Appirio), using Google Gadgets and Salesforce.com. Exhibit A in the differing rates of innovation between on-premise and on-demand software. But we're glad Oracle has caught up. Why? Because once Siebel is relegated to be the on-premise data store for a rich set of online gadgets, the benefits of replacing this on-premise backend with a modern on-demand platform will be clear.
- IBM's Cloud Strategy practice showed us how easy it is to port an application from Google App Engine to WebSphere. This is very cool to see, but for the opposite reason than they intended: Anyone care to predict how often companies will be moving off the low cost, highly scalable App Engine environment and onto WebSphere versus the other way around? Application portability is an important topic, and we're glad to see IBM contributing to the conversation... even if it is a bit jarring to see a WebSphere Server running at a Campfire event.
Server Sighting at Google Campfire: Why is there an on-premise server on stage with our colleagues from IBM and Oracle?
Labels: AppEngine, Cloud Computing, Google
Monday, March 02, 2009
Ryan Nichols
- Vic Gundotra, VP Engineering at Google, on the idea of cloud warfare: ""Paradigms of the past skew our vision of the present-- that's what's going on here. Maybe 10-15 years ago, the platform you were on influenced the applications you could run. Platform lock-in really mattered. The Internet has changed that. Through the web, we've created a platform that's open enough that you can just expect these apps to work together."
- Gina Bianchini, CEO of Ning, on the question of whether startups should use cloud platforms: "Markets are moving so much faster today. If you make the decision to use the old paradigm, not only are you spending a lot more money, you just can't compete."
- Paul Buchheit, Co-founder of FriendFeed and creator of Gmail, on the power of bringing together multiple cloud platforms: "The Internet is a single computer. When working with one machine, I no longer need to worry 'where is my data'-- end-users don't need to care"
- Amitabh Srivastava, Corporate VP of Windows Azure, laying out a surprising perspective on the future of cloud platforms: "I think you'll see a new set of platforms come in, each will be open and inter-operable."
- Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon: "The real value comes from aggregation of these resources...this will enable a whole new generation of applications that could never be built before."
- Lew Tucker, CTO of Cloud Computing at Sun Microsystems, on whether interesting businesses can be built on the cloud platforms of others: "The next Google is going to be built on the cloud. If you were starting today, you'd start directly on the cloud."
Even those stalwarts of the old world, SAP and Oracle are starting make more SaaS/PaaS noise . A topic we'll explore further later this week as part of our 2009 predictions series.
You can watch the entire three hours of the event here.
You can also watch it on co-presenter's ooyala's neat player.
Labels: Cloud Computing, Google, PaaS, SaaS, salesforce, Tech Crunch
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
C is for Cloud: Appirio raises Series C from GGV and Sequoia
Chris Barbin
Given today's headlines, we're humbled to announce our Series C funding from GGV Capital(formerly Granite Global Ventures) and Sequoia Capital. Amidst all the uncertainty confronting business and IT in today's economic climate, one thing remains certain: enterprise IT is moving to the cloud. That single idea is at the core of Appirio's business, and is an idea that's worth investing in precisely because we're in the worst spending environment any of us can remember.
The headlines for most venture-backed startups are grim: "Tech start-ups call it quits," writes the Wall Street Journal, as GigaOm describes "VCs sowing panic in their portfolio companies." We remember the buzz created by Sequoia's all-portfolio meeting last fall, featuring a picture of a slaughtered pig with all the fat removed.
Why is Appirio growing so dramatically in this environment?
Its a cliche that the easiest time to raise money is when you don't need it. Appirio's business model is strong and our services business has been profitable since our founding in October 2006. We create substantial value for our clients and share in the rewards of their success.
But it is still "early days" in the business of accelerating the adoption of on-demand in the enterprise, and we're excited to have our new partners at GGV Capital on-board. GGV specializes in deploying expansion capital, and today's investment from GGV and Sequoia Capital will be invaluable in our continued efforts to invest in products built on Force.com & Google App Engine, supporting and evolving our team of cloud computing professionals and investing in and innovating along side our strategic partners Salesforce.com, Google and Facebook.
Consider, for example, our other announcement today-- Appirio's expansion into Japan, the second largest IT market in the world, barely penetrated by traditional packaged application vendors. We believe that Japan has the opportunity to completely leapfrog on-premise packaged software and migrate directly to custom applications developed on an on-demand platform. Being part of this process (and the largest Force.com deployment in the world) is tremendously exciting.
We invite you to get involved. Schedule a discussion with us, take a trial of one of our products, look into joining our team, or even just contribute an idea. The transition to cloud computing is one thing to be certain of, even in these very uncertain times. We look forward to working together!
Labels: Cloud Computing, Google, PaaS, SaaS, salesforce, Sequoia-Capital
Thursday, January 15, 2009
2009 Prediction - Rise and Fall of the Private Cloud
#6 in our series of 2009 predictions
2008 saw massive hype around the concept of a “private cloud,” roughly defined as a adopting the technology and practices from public cloud providers for a single company behind the firewall. “Private clouds are the future of corporate IT” declared Gartner. “Private Clouds Take Shape,” gushed InformationWeek, citing the funding of companies like Elastra and Parascale. “Get off my cloud” said eWeek, questioning the security of public cloud environments compared to private clouds.
2009 Prediction
Here’s the rub: Private clouds are just an expensive data center with a fancy name. We predict that 2009 will represent the rise and fall of this over-hyped concept. Of course, virtualization, service-oriented architectures, and open standards are all great things for every company operating a data center to consider. But all this talk about “private clouds” is a distraction from the real news: the vast majority of companies shouldn’t need to worry about operating any sort of data center anymore, cloud-like or not.
- Private clouds are sub-scale: There’s a reason why most innovative cloud computing providers have their roots in powering consumer web technology—that’s where the numbers are. Very few corporate data centers will see anything close to the type of volume seen by these vendors. And volume drives cost—the world has yet to see a truly “at scale” data center.
- You can’t teach an old dog new tricks: What do you get when you move legacy applications as-is to a new and improved data center? Marginal improvements on your legacy applications. There’s only so much you can achieve without truly re-platforming your applications to a cloud infrastructure… you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. Now that’s not entirely fair…. You can certainly teach an old dog to be better behaved. But it’s still an old dog.
- On-premise does not equal secure: the biggest driver towards private clouds has been fear, uncertainty, and doubt about security. For many, it just feels more secure to have your data in a data center that you control. But is it? Unless your company spends more money and energy thinking about security than Amazon, Google, and Salesforce, the answer is probably “no.” (Read Craig Balding walk through “7 Technical Security Benefits of Cloud Computing”)
- There’s no secret sauce: There’s no simple set of tricks that an operator of a data center can borrow from Amazon or Google. These companies make their living operating the world’s largest data centers. They are constantly optimizing how they operate based on real-time performance feedback from millions of transactions. (check out this presentation from Jeff Barr and Peter Coffee at the Architecture and Integration Summit). Can other operators of data centers learn something from this experience? Of course. But the rate of innovation will never be the same—private data centers will always be many, many steps behind the cloud.
There’s also something very suspicious in all this discussion of private clouds…. private clouds are advocated mainly by companies who make their money from selling or operating data centers, and risk losing their shirts as real cloud computing drives more and more computing onto shared infrastructure. I understand why these companies are reluctant to embrace true cloud computing: Imagine being the junior partner in IBM Global Services pitching a client to develop an application on Amazon, Google, or Salesforce. Not only are you taking money out of the pocket of your colleagues in hardware and software….. you are also taking money out of the pocket of your colleagues in professional services, since integration and app development are so much easier using on-demand platforms.
- Cloud Providers: This is an easy one… companies that plan on being in the business of providing cloud computing capabilities to others need to think about how to effective provide their own cloud. But we’d argue that very few companies actually need to be in this business (e.g., we believe most on-demand BI vendors should be running on public cloud infrastructure).
- Highly regulated industries: Government regulation will always lag behind commercial application of technology. There will inevitably be instances where nervous politicians or policy makers write up requirements that can only be met through a private cloud.
- Companies in the process of moving to a public cloud: Of course, no company of any significant size can move its IT infrastructure to the cloud all at once. In fact, Appirio specializes in helping companies figure out what the right first step is away from their on-premise infrastructure. For the IT infrastructure that hasn’t yet moved, it definitely makes sense to think about how to use “private cloud” technology. But that means the private cloud is a temporary stop-gap, not the “future of enterprise IT.”
Of course any customer with a data center should be thinking about how to use the technologies behind “private clouds” to improve their efficiency. But this should be a minor element of your long-term IT strategy. The most important thing any IT department can do in 2009 is chart out a thoughtful plan to migrate significant portions of your IT infrastructure to the public cloud. Don’t let “private clouds” be a distraction from that goal.
Labels: 2009-Predictions, Amazon S3, BI, Cloud Computing, Force.com, Google, IBM, On Demand, PaaS, remove, 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
Thursday, July 03, 2008
Who is “fit” to provide enterprise apps?
Narinder Singh
The SaaS blogosphere has been abuzz these last couple of days discussing Sergey Solyanik’s assessment that Google’s culture is “not fit” for enterprise apps. We’ll say up front that Appirio runs our internal communication and collaboration using Google Apps, and have helped customers big and small do the same. We have been highly impressed with the quality, reliability, and rate of innovation in these tools, admire and respect the culture that created them, and have no hesitation calling them “enterprise ready.”
But we think that with all this talk about Google’s corporate culture, people are missing the real point—the culture of today’s traditional on-premise technology vendors is no longer “enterprise ready.”
Let me explain-- we believe that there is a cultural mismatch between the needs of today’s businesses and the cultures of traditional on-premise technology providers:
Today’s business needs agility, the culture of enterprise technology is anything but. As the global pace of change accelerates, business leaders need their IT staff and SI/ISV partners to be saying a lot more “yes” and a lot less “no.” It is no longer acceptable for an IT partner to make vague promises about a release 3 years out. When a CIO asked Hasso Plattner at the Churchill Club’s SaaS debate when he should move to SAP’s SaaS solutions, he was told to check back in “5 years, at least.” Is that what it means to have an “enterprise ready” culture?
Today’s business needs openness, the culture of enterprise technology is anything but. Traditional enterprise vendors have in their very DNA the idea that openness is dangerous to their business models. Businesses in all industries have accepted the notion of core vs. context—you focus on what you are good at and rely on seamless connections with a network of partners to provide the rest of your solution. Ironically, traditional enterprise software is one of the last industries to embrace this change. One of Hasso Plattner’s key lessons from SAP’s ill-fated experiment with SaaS is that “what is inside the system has to have a coverage level which is close to 100 percent,” he says. Openness will be there in name only—the intention is that everything you need is inside the system. Such a system has never existed, and never will. Is this what it means to have an “enterprise ready” culture?
So what does it mean to have an “enterprise-ready” culture? Of course, every traditional enterprise vendor wants to be agile and open, and many have made admirable strides in that direction, including SAP through its Developer Community and eSOA initiatives. And there is much more required to deliver enterprise solutions than agility and openness. There are the table stakes of reliability, security, and having a solution that meets a real business need. But today’s business requires IT partners with a culture that can do both-- be deeply rooted in agility and openness while delivering reliability, security, and business value. We think that Google and salesforce.com, the leaders in on-demand, have achieved this goal: Salesforce offers both trust.salesforce.com AND ideas.salesforce.com. Google offers highly innovative applications that scale like no traditional enterprise application will ever be able to.
But whether or not you agree with us that Google’s corporate culture is “enterprise ready," the real point is that its traditional on-premise competitors are most certainly not.
Labels: BusinessModels, Google, salesforce, SAP, Software, Software as a Service
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
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
Friday, April 18, 2008
Touring the Country with salesforce.com and Google
Narinder Singh
What an exciting week between Google and Salesforce! Let's recap with our perspective on Monday’s announcement event, and Wednesday’s Tour de Force marketing stop in New York City. A few overall observations:
- Expanding awareness: It’s clear that the market is starting to understand the power of platform as a service. Between Marc Benioff’s continuing evangelism of Force.com, Google’s campfire event in Mountain View to launch their AppEngine, and all the discussion this week about bringing Salesforce and Google together, companies are starting to think more broadly about how to combine the capabilities of Salesforce and Google. In our conversations with customers this week, there was more excitement than ever about the types of applications that are now possible.
- Expanding vision: The broader idea that’s starting to emerge from all these conversations is a vision for a new generation of applications that are now possible in the space between structured business applications like CRM, and completely unstructured business activity like email. This is a theme Google CEO Eric Schmidt touched on Monday that we’ll be returning to on this blog frequently.
- Role of partners: The importance the partners of Salesforce and Google to help customers make the most of these capabilities is becoming increasingly clear. A proof point is the role played by that partners in Monday’s Google announcement, and in the Tour de Force events. Salesforce and Google relied on their partner ecosystem to provide so much of the functionality powering Salesforce for Google Apps. This is a tremendous vote of confidence.
Much of the positioning around the announcement has been as a "Dream Come True." We agree! And we look forward to working with our customers and partners to make all this a reality in your enterprise. Until then, enjoy the sweets from Monday's announcement (below).
Labels: force, Google, Salesforce for Google Apps, salesforce.com, Tour De Force
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
