Based on the noise level generated by the Burton Group’s report on Google Apps in the enterprise, you’d think there was a sudden worldwide epiphany that the current offering from the Plex might not be ready for primetime in larger organizations. In it’s current state, one could argue convincingly that the suite isn’t ready for any serious business use and has a long way to go before anyone at Microsoft or IBM needs to do more than politely acknowledge the fact that Google has knocked on the door.
There’s a trend I’ve commented on for some time now, dating back more than a year when I witnessed an excruciatingly polite exchange between representatives from all three companies at the Collaborative Technologies Conference in 2006 (rebranded this year as Enterprise 2.0 by new owner CMP). It’s the “elephant in the room” syndrome where everyone does a dance around the fact that they all know there’s a large entity in the same space they’ve been occupying but no one wants to actually admit it.
InfoWorld, via NetworkWorld, provides a better summary of the report than the Burton Group’s own page and details what would probably be obvious to just about anyone paying attention to the web apps space:
- Google will, one day, be a force to be reckoned with but right now is a subject of curiosity rather than serious evaluation as a replacement for any installed product.
- Microsoft is the strongest of the incumbents with their Office and server products line. IBM’s Lotus products are potentially more susceptible to encroachment because they do not cover as much ground.
- Cisco’s acquisition of WebEx and Salesforce.com’s ongoing efforts at creating an application ecosystem around their CRM core are factors that need to be carefully considered as the marketplace realigns itself around public network deployment in the enterprise.
So far, so good. This is all patently obvious stuff and I suppose there’s no real harm in articulating what everyone already knows anecdotally with carefully conducted analyst research and reportage. NB: I have not read Burton’s report so I’m guessing here but they generally do a great job on this sort of exercise.
Ken Bisconti, vice president of messaging and collaboration software for IBM, is quoted in the article as saying at this year’s Enterprise 2.0 Conference:
“Most of our customers tell us they’re talking to the Google enterprise team,” he said. “Google is doing a good job of collecting information to understand enterprise requirements. … I don’t see them as a near-term competitor but as a long-term potential substitution.”
That makes perfect sense. What surprised me was the breathlessly repeated summation of the report and article that anyone in the enterprise who advocates immediate adoption of Google Apps is facing a potentially “career limiting” decision. As Josh Catone at Read/Write Web wrote, “File this one under ‘D’ for ‘Duh’”. It almost made me want to immediately conduct a survey of enterprise IT managers and C-level folks to see if I could find anyone who was actually considering adoption of Google Apps as anything more than a comparative learning exercise.
Here’s the bottom line from my considered perspective. There is a small minority segment of the overall population that wants to work in the cloud full-time. If you’re one of them, the good news is that productivity suite choices abound from Google to ThinkFree* to Zoho. Dozens of other players touch some aspect of the collaboration and productivity space like 37signals and the plethora of GTD-inspired projects- and actions-tracking applications (Nozbe, Remember the Milk, and Vitalist are good examples). And offerings like Central Desktop, Etelos, Mindtouch, and others are increasingly offering productivity tools in their products.
But the inescapable and inarguable truth is that online-only appeals only to a minority of users. And in the enterprise, to almost no one. Too many questions remain unanswered from SLAs (Service Level Agreements) and QoS (Quality of Service) guarantees to security to disaster recovery to redundancy to… well, you get the idea. This is the bread and butter of enterprise deployment decision-making and no one has really convinced the enterprise that this critical stuff has been adequately addressed. So the poking and prodding continues but the go/no go decision is still off in the mists.
It’s a big and noisy space. How it shakes out is, at this point, anyone’s guess. There are certainly mergers and acquisitions in the near and not-so-near future as consolidation takes place and market acceptance grows. While it’s a safe assumption that Google, like Microsoft and IBM, needs to be given serious odds at emerging as a front runner in the race, it’s a marathon, not a sprint. And funny things happen in a long race that are completely unpredictable when the runners are lining up for the starting gun – especially in a crowded field.
Consider the implications of Rich Internet Applications. These hybrid applications, combining the power and rich feature set of client applications with online access to data and services, are in their infancy but represent a distinct and attractive new deployment vector. Microsoft’s Ray Ozzie has been preaching the gospel of applications plus services which is a natural approach for a company with the majority installed base to take. And a number of online-only players are rethinking the need to provide a way to work when disconnected.
Incumbency and a powerful brand are powerful market forces but they do not always guarantee success. That’s where innovation and out-of-left-field thinking have proven, time and again, that disruption is possible. I think keeping an open mind and a willingness to remain observant and agile at this early juncture is the posture most decision makers and influencers in the enterprise are in right now.
And that’s just plain smart.
* Disclosure: I’m an adviser to ThinkFree.
Technorati tags: google, microsoft, ibm, lotus, salesforce, collaboration, productivity
August 26th, 2007 at 10:06 am
Great analysis! Right now, apps like Google Docs are in first generation, and their decision to use AJAX technology means that they are inherently limited in the features and user experience they can provide. I therefore have no trouble believing Google when they say that the current Google Docs product is not designed to compete with Microsoft - it is a product designed to do one thing (collaboration) which is better done online rather than offline. I find it incredibly hard to believe, however, that they will not aim to compete in the future.
Down the road, Office 2.0 could go several ways. We might see greater P2P live collaboration between desktop apps such as MS Office. Another option would be the use of some sort of RIA tech to fuse the benefits of online and offline into one application, which will either run through the browser using something like Silverlight combined with Google Gears or on the desktop with something like AIR. It is difficult to see where this is headed, but I think the only thing we can be certain of is that it will become an increasingly important way of working.
August 26th, 2007 at 11:20 am
“There is a small minority segment of the overall population that wants to work in the cloud full-time.” That is going to be my new favourite quote on this. And yes, that is what is is about.
I was absolutly astonished last year on the conference to see the ideas of those cloudy people (and I consider myself to be one of them as well) how much they DON’T understand about enterprise.
And remember thinkfree as nearly the only one at least looking like office, which is a major bonus. From that perspective for example I hate Open Office because it limits me as a power user (translate: the different menues and key combos drives me nuts as does Lotus), but Google for the smaller need manages to allow me to work in Excel and Word mode for the basics.
And no, I do not think anyone is enterprise is seriously considering that either, even stressing the importance of yes that is a career endangering decision - but only because considering it shows that you have no clue about it if you do.
Looking forward from you reports of Office 2.0!
August 26th, 2007 at 12:05 pm
One of the implications of using google apps that is often overlooked, is the long term issue of document ownership. At my previous job, we used google docs, from personal accounts, for the forms related to requesting testing of our product. After I left (I was fired), I still retain ownership of many of these files, and see no way for me to transfer ownership of the document to ex-colleagues or to remove myself from collaboration rights for documents I once edited that are owned by others.
This is an important issue, and if you are going to use google apps in the enterprise, make sure the company controls the google accounts being used.
August 26th, 2007 at 1:35 pm
Excellent observations from all of you. The whole paradigm of how we move critical line of business applications and workflows to the net/web/cloud (pick your favorite label) is in its infancy. This is why I think that, at least for the short term, the hybrid approach espoused in RIA philosophies is likely to be the one most acceptable to businesses of all sizes. Hosted services and trust relationships aren’t the problem – we’ve had that in place for decades now. It’s the huge number of service providers and their relatively unproven track records that create a lot of the murk. And events like the recent Skype outage thrown into sharp relief the consequences of putting too much reliance on a single point of potential failure.
August 26th, 2007 at 9:45 pm
There was a small minority who thought a PC on every desktop made sense, and the vast majority kept investing in large scale mainframes. I welcome the move to the cloud, and although it is obvious (and should go without stating) that it won’t happen overnight, it is happening right now. 10 years ago the average employee didn’t have an Internet connection on their desk. Now most employees would quit if they didn’t have one. 10 years ago, webmail was in its infancy and the average person communicated via their work email. Today, there are over a billion active webmail accounts and the number continues to grow. If you are looking at cloud computing and thinking it won’t happen… well, you know, the dinosaurs didn’t see it coming either.
August 26th, 2007 at 10:08 pm
Evolved: I didn’t say that a move to the cloud wasn’t going to happen - just that there is, at present, only a small minority of people who have committed to this workstyle. That’s based on first-hand experience in marketing web-based applications to business in the first bubble and this time around as well. The pushback is still there and it’s backed by significant and justifiable concerns. That’s true in the enterprise and in SOHO and SMB (small and medium) businesses as well.
Ultimately, I think most of the work we do *will* be cloud-based. But not immediately and not even soon for most organizations. There are still too many variables that need to be sorted out including a clear standard which, as Geoffrey Moore pointed out a long time ago, the early majority needs to coalesce.
Future-facing folks see the inexorable nature of the move to the cloud. Gen Y people entering the workforce have a high(er) comfort level with this approach to work and collaboration. The trend lines are pretty clear. But, as you yourself note, it will take time.
August 27th, 2007 at 2:27 am
Well, there is a huge difference between having a mainframe and having everything on the net somehwere from a biz standpoint of view.
And as for internet connection at every place and those employees quitting without it? At least in Germany, many bigger companies have a policy in place that surfing for personal reasons is not allowed. And most of those employees dayjob does not have a reason to surf the net other than that.
I am all for centralized data and as i can see it you do get a trend back to central administered machines as terminals, which for most actually is a good thing.
The smaller companies though lack very often the understanding to structure and organize IT and the processes coming with it - resulting in what Nicola described. And I am sorry to say but it seems they need to be burned like this to understand certain things.
Will SMB - more the smaller ones - move to the net? Yes of course they will, because it is much more complicated for them to run and maintain even a working network share, on any computer system. So the net is the easiest option but still not really the cleverest one …
August 27th, 2007 at 5:14 am
Excellent points Nicole. It’s all too easy to take a parochial view on this important subject - be it a US-focused one (something most of us technology bloggers are all too guilty of) or simply one based on our own immediate circle of work and play. While SMB (particularly the smaller ones as you point out) are a natural to move to the cloud due to constraints on technical staff, knowledge, and budgets, I can tell you with a certainty based on research into that market segment I’ve personally conducted that there is a lot of trepidation at the idea. Small and medium-sized businesses have the same kinds of security, reliability, accessibility, and redundancy concerns that larger organizations do. And until those concerns can be adequately addressed and a benefit that outweighs them clearly expressed in terms that resonate with this audience, there’s no urgency to make the migration.
August 30th, 2007 at 1:19 am
[…] So the poking and prodding continues but the go/no go decision is still off in the mists. Source: blognation USA technology Company Index: Zoho, ThinkFree […]
August 31st, 2007 at 1:14 pm
[…] When Zoho announced they were implementing Google Gears to allow Zoho Writer to have some basic offline abilities, I was less than enthused. My esteemed colleague Marc Orchant comments on the Burton report on GoogleApps: But the inescapable and inarguable truth is that online-only appeals only to a minority of users. And in the enterprise, to almost no one. Too many questions remain unanswered from SLAs (Service Level Agreements) and QoS (Quality of Service) guarantees to security to disaster recovery to redundancy to… well, you get the idea. This is the bread and butter of enterprise deployment decision-making and no one has really convinced the enterprise that this critical stuff has been adequately addressed. So the poking and prodding continues but the go/no go decision is still off in the mists. Source: blognation USA technology » Blog Archive » Much ado about Google Apps […]