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."
Source: Forrester
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).
Secondly, mail and calendar migration is non-trivial from both a technical perspective as well as organizationally. So, careful planning and a sequenced approach incorporating pilots are critical to success. We've held Google Apps "Bootcamps" to explore these issues, with speakers from companies like Genentech talking about their success (click here for a video).
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
Friday, November 21, 2008
What IS the "Hidden" Cost of Google Apps?
Carl Krupitzer
Google Apps Disastrous? Certainly possible. But the potential for disaster DOES NOT lie in the product itself, but rather in how an organization introduces change. In the article Blum describe his users as "struggling", flat-out refusing to use the application, and floundering with login issues (which in his defense can be confusing...I'll clarify and offer some hints on that later). Appirio, on the other hand, has executed successful Google Apps migrations for extremely large companies. The cost savings have been in the millions. The most recent was a large biotech company which migrated their entire corporation from Oracle calendar to GCal. The migration was hugely successful, with 9,800 users successfully logged in on the first morning to do their work.
So the question really is "what's different?" How did a company of thousands migrate users successfully while Blum had near rebellion with 12?
The answer: a carefully planned rollout and an understanding that you are changing the game for your workers. Our customer took the time to identify champions and put forth a thoughtful communications and training campaign. They made change exciting and fun for their community. The results spoke for themselves. The support war room that had been planned to be open for several weeks after the deployment was closed because of lack of issues within 2 days.
Our tough message for Jonathan Blum? You are asking your users to step away from the very tools that make them productive on a daily basis. You have to plan and train people for that change. You can't just "throw out" their tools and expect them to maintain their current work load, while learning new tools, and remember a long URL string! Over the last decade, employees have invested time and energy in becoming proficient and productive with MS Office. These type of communication and collaboration solutions are truly core to our productivity as knowledge workers. Change is never fun-- investing in the training and development of your staff is necessary to keep them innovating and productive.
Google Apps represents a shift in mindset as much as it is a replacement of a tool. Instead of rolling out Apps with "tough love," you should encourage the adoption and foster the creativity that this tool set promises to deliver. Recognize that employees want to do good work and be productive, and give them tools like Google Apps that millions of consumers love to use.
But back to the login issue that Blum highlights in his article: No doubt at first glance the login situation with Google is confusing. You have the concept of personal Google Accounts and your Enterprise Apps accounts, and the two things can and often do have the same account name and password. A personal Google Account is similar to MS Passport, simply a means of verifying your identity. To add to the confusion you often do have many different logins for different services Google offers. It is clearly an area that has caused frustration for users and something that Google will have to address eventually.
Much of the confusion can be eliminated however during the provisioning of your Apps instance. Setting up any messaging infrastructure takes planning and consideration. Google has included some great tools to help including Single Sign On support and the ability to restrict access to a certain IP range. Many partners including Appirio, have created tools to bulk provision large numbers of accounts and provide synchronization with Identity Management systems such as Active Directory. Apps is a sophisticated solution and one that can and does meet the needs of many organizations. All it takes is a planning!
Here is some tactical advice to help Blumsday (free of charge!)
- 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.
At the end of the day, Google Apps is not complicated-- the feature set is actually far simpler than the MS Office counterparts. This simplicity of user experience, however, supports collaboration features that will change how your people work. Video chat, corporate video sharing, online presentation capabilities, having multiple people work on a single version of a document at the same time... all in a package which gets better and better automatically every quarter. Throw in the ability to shut off the Exchange servers and stop sending back up tapes to offsite storage, and the story becomes simply amazing for $50/year.
The business case for Google Apps is fool proof - unless you approach the change and migration foolishly.
Labels: Cloud Computing, Google, Google Apps, Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft Office, Software as a Service, Video Chat
Tuesday, June 03, 2008
Adobe Embraces the Cloud - Hazy Days Ahead for Microsoft?
Narinder Singh
Yesterday Adobe announced Acrobat.com - a new set of collaborative apps available online that allow users to create and share documents and PDFs, host web meetings and much more. The announcement received significant attention from the press and bloggers, and highlights the degree to which Microsoft's office monopoly is being attacked. A number of excellent articles discuss what's available in Acrobat.com, but we'd like to focus on a couple related questions that CIOs may have in this area.
Microsoft may be lagging on collaboration features, but won't they eventually get there? Shouldn't I just wait?
We have, in this blog, often highlighted the fundamental challenges facing on-premise vendors attempting to create Internet-based SaaS solutions. They face two basic constraints. First is the pricing model. It's hard to put out an offering that competes with existing products and costs only a fraction of what you're currently charging. Google Apps are free (for enterprise domain support, users pay $50/seat/year). Acrobat.com is also free in limited use. Microsoft can't simply lower its prices this dramatically without throwing its investors into a tizzy. Even if Microsoft could provide its on-premise Windows + Office licenses at this price point, the overall solution - including hardware, other applications and labor - would still cost companies many times what an Internet-based solution does.
This seriously limits Microsoft's options, and leads to the second major constraint: On-premise solutions are physically and emotionally closed systems. This is a subject I discussed during a media roundtable last week at the Google I/O developer conference.
Microsoft products have been architected for over 20 years around the notion of a single user working on a document. This makes them incompatible with the shared multi-tenant approach of salesforce.com, Google, and others. When the Internet boom arrived, Microsoft was slow to get it, they just added a few basic capabilities to allow documents to be sent back and forth between individual silos (even the original version of Bill Gates's 1995 book "The Road Ahead" barely even mentioned the web ). The later introduction of Sharepoint was a way to work around the constraints of this approach, but it's a far cry from Internet-style collaboration. On the Internet, everything starts with sharing, working together, and exchanging information. Google Apps, and now Acrobat.com, revolve around those principles. Adobe didn't simply add a "share" button to its on-premise applications and declare victory.
Using Office to improve how people work together in your organization is like asking an emotionally closed person to facilitate a session on open communication. Microsoft would have to basically become a different person (or undergo a lifetime of therapy) to drive new improvements to collaboration in an enterprise.
Google Apps and Acrobat.com sound like similar concepts. Do I need to wait for one to win or can I use both together?
win or can I use both together?
While Adobe and Google Apps have some overlap (e.g. document support), most of their capabilities are distinct (Google Mail and Calendar, Adobe Connect Now for web meetings) and generally complementary. Even if they had substantially more overlap, we believe choice is ultimately good for the customer. It helps prevents Microsoft-style monopoly pricing and gives customers more options to meet varying business needs.
Overlap does not mean they are mutually exclusive either. Cloud-based products are inherently more open and allow for deeper connections between solutions. For example, Appirio Contact Sync for Salesforce and Google Apps was built on two cloud solutions - Google and salesforce.com - keeping contacts in both applications updated and in sync. This gives customers more flexibility in where they store contacts without needing to enter duplicate data. Companies like Appirio, are helping customers to get more benefit out of one platform, say Google or Adobe, while allowing seamless interaction with other SaaS solutions.
In the web world, customers shouldn't have to decide the equivalent of the Beta vs. VHS standard wars (or for those more current Blueray vs. HD-DVD). Because of the open nature of "the cloud", solutions can be more easily integrated. This means vendors no longer have to figure out every future permutation to maintain an integrated solution. Those who try to will never move quickly enough to keep up with what customers need. Instead vendors can focus on the core qualities of their SaaS applications, such as their primary functional value, open APIs, multi-tenancy, open business practices, and how they maintain the highest rate of innovation. This preserves future options and allows vendors (and their customers) to benefit from the innovations of the larger ecosystem.
Adobe, with its launch of Acrobat.com, may one day represent a case study on how a large on-premise business can transform itself. By using their core assets and applying them to a new market, Adobe has the opportunity to fully embrace the future of cloud computing. If they remain true to this vision, they will provide customers with more reputable choices in the cloud, and will further relegate the old guard of on-premise software to playing catch up.
Labels: Acrobat.com, Adobe, Google Apps, Microsoft Office, SaaS
