Capgemini to provide IT services for Google Apps
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(InfoWorld) - Google has formed a partnership with Capgemini, which will provide IT services to large businesses that adopt the Google Apps Premier Edition hosted suite of collaboration and communication software. A new member of the Google Enterprise Professional program, Capgemini now offers training, support, integration, and other services for Google Apps Premier Edition customers, the vendors plan to announce Monday. The partnership with Capgemini, one of the world's largest IT services companies with over 75,000 employees in 32 countries, makesÂ Google Apps more palatableÂ to large organizations that prefer IT services providers to assist them with changes and additions to their large, complex IT architectures. "Our overall partner strategy is to make sure that those customers that come on board have the services they need or request," said Kevin Smith, Google's head of enterprise partnerships. In the case ofÂ Google Apps Premier EditionÂ customers, some may hire Capgemini to help them with e-mail migration, with adding the suite to an existing single sign-on system, or with making sure that the Calendar component synchronizes properly with employees devices, Smith said. Meanwhile, Capgemini, which generated revenue of $10.4 billion in 2006, added Google Apps to the portfolio of products it supports because it believes thatÂ demand for software-as-a-service (SaaS) collaboration and communication suites will grow strongly in coming years, company officials said. For Capgemini, offering services for a SaaS suite like Google Apps Premier Edition is a natural extension of its broad expertise providing outsourced desktop support to more than 1 million users worldwide, they said. The Premier Edition, introduced in February, is a fee-based version of the Google Apps suite that is tailored for workplace use in organizations of all sizes. For $50 per user per year, it offers phone technical support, software interfaces for integrating suite components with other systems and more e-mail storage than the free Standard Edition. As CIOs and IT managers in large companies warm up to the idea of these Web-hosted suites, global IT services providers like Capgemini are drawn to develop services for them, said Rebecca Wettemann, an analyst with Nucleus Research Inc. "We'll likely see services providers start to recognize the opportunity to help implement these applications within enterprises, going beyond desktop management and delivering a heterogenous desktop to an organization," Wettemann said. Google, which generates most of its revenue from the consumer market through online ads delivered via its search engines and partner Web sites, has decided to broaden its scope and become a provider of IT products for enterprises. In so doing, it is locking horns with established players in markets like collaboration and communication software, and in enterprise search. Google Apps, with its Web hosted approach to collaboration and communication software, is seen as emblematic of theÂ threat this SAAS model presents to Microsoft's Office, the quintessential fat-client software suite. With an installed base of about 450 million users, Microsoft Office doesn't have a hosted version that is comparable to SAAS suites like Google Apps and others from companies like Zoho, Zimbra and WebEx. Google Apps includes word processing, calendar, Web page creation, spreadsheet applications, Webmail and instant messaging communication services. Among the advantages of Web-hosted applications is that, by holding documents in a central server, they allow users to share files and collaborate on them. Also, because vendors host them, customers don't have to worry about installing or maintaining the software nor about issues with the server hardware in which they run. Downsides include security concerns over the hosting of sensitive data with a vendor outside the corporate firewall, server downtime problems and feature sets that often are less extensive than the ones from packaged software products.
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Capgemini , Europe's largest computer consultancy, said on Monday it would partner U.S. software group Google Inc  in supporting the Google Apps software package.
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Matalan offered Rightshored[tm] services Capgemini has offered to shift UK jobs overseas in a bid to retain its Â£40m contract to provide IT services for the retail chain Matalan, The Register has learned.â¦
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(InfoWorld) - Google isÂ putting finishing touches onÂ the integration of Docs & Spreadsheets with Google Apps for Your Domain --another step in its strategy to build a suite of hosted applications for organizations. The introduction of the new version ofÂ Google Apps for Your DomainÂ including Docs & Spreadsheets will happen this quarter, and it could come as early as next week, several people familiar with the company's plans said. It has been widely assumed that at some point Google would add Docs & Spreadsheets, a word processing and a spreadsheet program, to Google Apps, a suite of communication services for organizations. Docs & Spreadsheets lets multiple users share files and collaborate on them. Google Apps provides white-label versions of several Google communication services, including the Gmail Web mail service, the Talk instant message and voice chat service and the Calendar online scheduling service. Organizations can provide these services with their own Internet domain and branding to their users. Arizona State University, which launched Google Apps in October for its students, would be very interested in having Docs & Spreadsheets as part of the suite, said Kari Barlow, assistant vice president of the university's technology office. "Where the strength is with Docs & Spreadsheets is in the ability to synchronously collaborate on documents," Barlow said. Groups of students could use it to collaborate on class projects, she said. "Google Apps has been highly successful for us. We're looking at extending the environment and implementing new technologies as they are released to us. It'll be interesting to see when Docs & Spreadsheets comes out, how that will impact the environment," Barlow said. Not everyone sees a use for the Docs & Spreadsheets integration, however. San Jose City College is delighted with Google Apps, which it adopted mostly to provide e-mail accounts to its students, but doesn't see a clear need to offer them hosted word processing and spreadsheet software at this time, said Michael John Renzi, the college's director of finance and administration. However, the college would like the suite to have a course management application, he said. Google Apps is free but Google plans to introduce a more sophisticated, fee-based version for large organizations. Google Apps and Docs & Spreadsheets have been parallel projects in Google's attempt to enter the hosted applications market and expand beyond its core search engine business. Many see Google gearing up to compete against Microsoft's PC-based Office applications suite. Proponents of hosted applications say they are more convenient than the PC-based, packaged software upon which Microsoft has built its empire. Hosted applications are housed in vendor servers, freeing customers' IT departments from installation and maintenance work, and from having to purchase extra hardware and storage, proponents say. However, the consensus currently is that hosted applications suites don't come close to offering the breadth of features that Microsoft Office has. Google has other hosted applications for organizations, including Google Analytics, a hosted service for tracking Web site usage and traffic. The company also has a wiki platform that it acquired when it bought JotSpot Inc. last year. It has been rumored that Google is developing a presentations application. Google declined to comment for this story.
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InfoWorld - Capgemini&#160;, a major global services provider, has just partnered with Google to enable large-scale adoption of the enterprise version of Google Apps.
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By adding POP support to its Gmail service, Google is enabling customers to download messages to Microsoft Outlook and other applications.
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Ingram Micro will distribute several Google enterprise search tools and services.
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Google Inc. GOOG.O is allowing   users to add hundreds of different miniature Web-based programs   built by Google or outside programmers to other sites, the   company said on Tuesday.
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(InfoWorld) - Google plans toÂ add a presentations applicationÂ to its Web applications suite on Tuesday, delivering on a promise made in April. The suite, until now known as Docs & Spreadsheets, will also be renamed Google Docs on Monday. Because Google Docs is part of the broader Google Apps suite of collaboration and communication applications, Google Apps users will also get the presentations application. The delivery of the presentations application will no doubt once again turn up the heat on industry discussions thatÂ Google Docs and Google Apps rival Microsoft's OfficeÂ suite of productivity applications and the Outlook/Exchange messaging platform. There is a key architectural difference between the Google and Microsoft suites: Google's is hosted in the search company's data centers while Microsoft's is packaged software designed to be installed on users' computers. TheÂ viability of Web hosted applications, with their software-as-a-service (SaaS) model, is no longer in question, although the consensus is that, while the future belongs to them, theyÂ will not completely displaceÂ traditional packaged applications. The issue is that, while Google and others like Zoho and Zimbra push ahead expanding and improving their SaaS suites, Microsoft is perceived by many to be dragging its feet in coming up with SaaS versions of its Office products. "Microsoft needs to take a careful look at its enterprise strategy for both messaging and the desktop," said Rebecca Wettemann, an analyst with Nucleus Research. Having delivered the presentations application, Google Docs and the broader Google Apps, which includes e-mail, instant messaging, calendar, and a Web page creator, have filled the only big hole they had in their ability to compete with Microsoft Office and Outlook/Exchange, she said. "Microsoft should be very concerned," Wettemann said. The benefits of SaaS communication and collaboration suites have already caught the attention of thousands of organizations of all sizes worldwide. Because the vendor -- Google in this case -- hosts the software, which end-users access via a Web browser, clients don't have to install the software or worry about upgrading it. Another benefit is that this type of SaaS application, designed to live on a hosted server is typically built to make it easy for users to share documents and collaborate on them. There are downsides to the SaaS model as well.Â Security concernsÂ exist about housing applications and data in a vendor servers. Availability and performance problems sometimes arise from server failures. It is also generally agreed that Google Apps and similar suites from other vendors don't have as many features and functionality as long established communication and collaboration platforms like Microsoft's Office, Outlook and Exchange and IBM's Lotus Notes/Domino. However, the SaaS suites generally cost significantly less. For example, Google Docs is free, while Google Apps has free versions and one designed for workplace use called Premier that costs $50 per user per year and includes more sophisticated features, including broader administrative controls for IT staffers. In the case of the Google Docs presentations application, Wettemann estimates that it has about 60 percent of the features in Microsoft Office's PowerPoint. Google officials point out that Google Docs and Google Apps aren't intended to replace Microsoft Office and Exchange, but rather complement them or be an option to users and organizations who don't have them. It's widely expected that Google Apps will soon gain a wiki component based on technology Google acquired almost a year ago when itÂ bought JotSpot. The presentations application, still in an early stage, will let users create presentations and store them in a central server, where they can be shared with colleagues, who can in turn edit them. Users will also be able to share slide shows of a presentation with others and chat with them in real time. They will also be able to import presentations created with Microsoft PowerPoint. The ability to export presentations to PowerPoint will be added later. Â
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In the latest step in its continuing effort to focus the Web services model around its own servers, Google this morning introduced a way to enable individuals to embed some Google Gadgets within Web pages, without the need to install software.
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(InfoWorld) - Capgemini has agreed to acquire the software services company Software Architects to expand its presence in key U.S. cities, the French IT services provider said Thursday. The purchase of Software Architects, which focuses on project management, architecture and business technology services, will provide a gateway for new business in cities such as Tampa, Florida, and Phoenix, Arizona, according to Gapgemini. The software services company, which is located in Chicago, has a strong focus on MicrosoftÂ and IBMÂ technologies. Software Architects, a 500-employee company with revenues of $68 million in 2006, will be folded into Sogeti USA, a subsidiary of Capgemini. Sogeti will then have 2,000 employees in 24 U.S. cities, Capgemini said. The deal is subject to the approval Software Architects shareholders, antitrust clearance and customary closing conditions, Capgemini said. No financial details were disclosed. Capgemini has lowered costs for customers by delivering a mix of offshore services with on-site expertise, the company said. It has pushed into India and plans to have about 10,000 staff there by the end of this year. In October 2006,Â Capgemini bought Kanbay InternationalÂ for $1.25 billion to increase its ability to deliver services from India and gain access to Kanbay's large financial institution clients. A month prior, Capgemini acquired aÂ 51 percent stake in Unilever India Shared Services, a finance and accounting business process outsourcing operation in India belonging to European consumer goods maker Unilever Group.
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Web search leader Google Inc. has  begun delivering a set of essential business software tools to  paying subscribers, in a move to widen its appeal to corporate  customers, the company said on Wednesday.
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Software giant makes bid in an attempt to challenge growing might of Google
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(InfoWorld) - Following Google's announcement on Thursday that it would offer an enhanced version of its Google Apps, dubbed Google Apps Premier Edition, the company left no doubt about the direction in which it was heading. Not only has it added key business applications -- a word processor and spreadsheet -- to Google Apps, but the company is offering the kind of support corporate IT would expect: IT management tools, technical support, and service level agreements for uptime. Even all that, however, does not tell the entire story or give the scope of Googleâs plans. In its press announcement and in an interview with a Google executive, Dave Giroud, vice president and general manager of the Enterprise Unit, Google made it clear that it will offer APIs for business integration, thus creating a business platform not unlike what Salesforce.com offers with AppExchange. [Related story: "Avaya to add VoIP to Google Apps" | Podcast: Google's Rajen Sheth discusses Apps | Talkback: "Can Web-based applications outwit, outplay, outlast the desktop?"] If that happens it could become the center of an application ecosystem that leaves traditional desktop applications in the dust. Both Avaya and Postini participated in the Google announcement on Thursday saying they would develop a "variety of solutions" based on Google's APIs. Included among those third-party applications will be e-mail gateways, enhanced security, calendar synchronization, and VoIP integration between Avaya and Google Talk. The reason some analysts have characterized the announcement as historic rests with the fact that Google is the first top-tier company to offer a 21st century solution that will compete with Microsoft Office, a suite of applications created in the 20th century and well before the Internet or HTML existed. With the addition of word processing and a spreadsheet as well as support, Google Apps could very well represent a watershed moment in a wave of online applications from many other new companies that some day might overwhelm giant Microsoft. However, Josh Greenberg, senior analyst at Enterprise Applications Consulting, offers more cautions than he does encomiums about Google Apps and how successful Google can be against the Redmond giant. "Google is the number one media company and they have a great search. That doesn't mean they have the credentials to be a player in desktop applications," Greenberg said. Greenberg says Google needs to "dress up" Google Apps to make it look corporate in terms of security, feature functionality, and interoperability. But perhaps more importantly, Microsoft is not standing still, Greenberg adds. Microsoft is no longer a collection of stand-alone applications. It is morphing into a strategic interface for ERP and other transaction processes, Greenberg says, pointing out the recent deal with SAP and the co-developed Duet technology. "Every single enterprise player of note has an Office interface," Greenberg said. And despite Google's wide appeal in the consumer market, corporate uptake of Office drives a tremendous amount of personal use, he added. Is this a play on Google's part to go head to head against a player in its own backyard, Salesforce.com and its AppExchange? For that to happen it would require a huge uptake on the part of third-party application developers. Tony Meadow, president of Bear River Associates, an application development company, says the promise of a huge, available market for third-party applications does not always guarantee that developers will follow it. Meadow says that idea already exists with Microsoft and it has only been successful to a limited extent. "There are people who develop complete spreadsheets with Excel that are sold as products, so it is not inconceivable that it will happen with Google but at this point it is an unknown," Meadow said. Despite the roadblocks to gain entry into the enterprise all indications point to Google gearing up to do just that. Sources say Google is buying up a great deal of dark fiber all around the country and at the same time hiring telecommunications engineers and delivering during the past year or two thousands of server blades to what are called Peering Centers, datacenters where networks converge to optimize connectivity. This could be happening so that Google can offer the kind of quality of service, so-called five 9s uptime, required by the very biggest of enterprises before they would consider using an online streaming application. Finally, Google executives are already making it quite clear where they are heading. Both Douglas Merrill, CIO and vice president of Engineering at Google, and Eric Schmidt, CEO, are increasingly going on the record about Google Apps in the enterprise. "The hardest thing to build is a million-user consumer application with no downtime. We have taken that opportunity to bullet proof [for] large scale enterprise applications," Schmidt said. Merrill even touches on the current climate of government regulations and the fact that Google Apps were built to meet those new demands. "We built applications to meet regulatory requirement for even the largest enterprise companies. That means Google Apps already have enterprise security built into them," Merrill said. Nevertheless, Google isn't the first company to attempt an Office killer. Whether it is Sun's Star Office most recently or WordPerfect from a previous generation, with 450 million users, chipping away at the Microsoft Office user base won't be easy. Greenberg has reservations about whether or not Google understands this part of the market well enough to be a serious competitor. And he warns that one of the lessons of capitalism in the 20th century is that "extreme verticalization" doesn't succeed. Companies need to outsource functions that companies are not an expert at. And, some would say, what Google does best is search and they should not get diverted by what other companies do best. Only time will tell. Jeffrey Falk, director of product development at The Members Group says his company, which has about 150 people and revenues in the $50 million range, would consider Google Apps as a replacement for Microsoft Office mostly for the cost savings. But, he added it would have to meet a number of stringent requirements first. "If we could find an ironclad solution that would deliver a quick time to market as far as the learning curve for us and we could overcome the hurdles of security and become comfortable with that, Google Apps has some legs," Falk said.
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French IT services company CapgeminiÂ is acquiring a 51 percent stake in Unilever India Shared Services, a finance and accounting business process outsourcing (BPO) operation in India belonging to European consumer goods maker Unilever Group. The financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed.
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Google and Microsoft separately plan to introduce on Thursday enhanced information sharing services for Internet users. Microsoft plans for the first time to offer a
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(InfoWorld) - Google is pushing further into the communication and collaboration applications market with a major upgrade of Google Apps, a hosted suite for organizations of all sizes that analysts say could soon become a real competitor to Microsoft Office. On Thursday, Google will introduce a Google Apps version that, for a fee, offers guaranteed uptime, IT management tools, technical support, increased e-mail storage, andÂ integration with the Docs & SpreadsheetsÂ word processing and spreadsheet applications, as well as BlackBerry support for Gmail. With a cost $50 per user per year, Google Apps Premier Edition becomes the third and most sophisticated version of the suite, which was launched in August with the free Standard Edition and Education Edition versions. Like the original editions, Premier will have services like Gmail Web mail, Calendar shared scheduling, and Talk instant messaging. The suite was until today called Google Apps for Your Domain, because organizations offer these Google hosted services using their own Internet domain and branding. The Standard edition is used by over 100,000 small businesses, and the Education edition by hundreds of universities. SF Bay Pediatrics, which has two medical offices in the San Francisco area, implemented the Premier edition in January for most of its 25 employees, which until then had used individual e-mail accounts from providers like AOL. "We had no control over e-mail, and supporting it was a nightmare," said Andrew Johnson, the company's chief information officer. With Gmail, the performance and management e-mail problems disappeared, he said. While SF Bay Pediatrics employees use Microsoft's Office suite, they also use Docs & Spreadsheets to store their files on a central server and collaborate on them, Johnson said. "I don't see us going fully software-as-a-service yet, but maybe in the future," he said. Indeed, Google Apps represents a new, hosted approach for productivity suites, a market ruled by Office, which is mostly desktop software. Despite security and privacy concerns over storing applications and data on a third-party datacenter, organizations are increasingly adopting hosted models, because the vendor stores applications on its own datacenter and thus frees IT departments from spending time and money on hardware and software maintenance. Forrester ResearchÂ isn't telling enterprises to drop Office, but it is recommending that CIOs give Google Apps a serious look, in large measure because Office's price is high, said analyst Erica Driver. Today, Google Apps is a cheaper alternative to the core Office applications, but eventually it could be a replacement option, as Google grows its capabilities and CIOs get more comfortable with software-as-a-service, she said. "Microsoft has a chance to respond, but this changes the game," Driver said. Microsoft says Office has steadily gained hosted service components for years, and it believes this combination with the core PC software is the right approach. Beyond native Office services,Â Office Live, with about 250,000 subscribers, offers a set of hosted services for small businesses, like Web site creation and hosting, while Office Online, with 70 million monthly unique users, offers Office online resources. "We're very committed to both [hosted] services and [PC] software," said Kirk Gregersen, director with Microsoft's Office team. On the issue of Office's price, Gregersen pointed out that Office customers have had less expensive alternatives, even free ones, for years, but that when deciding to buy Office, they have traditionally taken other factors into account beyond cost. Still, some Office users, like Prudential Preferred Properties in Chicago, feel the price sting, which for this real estate firm in Chicago is between $350 and $400 per license. "We have instances in which the Office license was more expensive than the PC it's on," said Camden Daily, Prudential's technology director. Google Apps found its way into Prudential, which has 450 employees, as the salvation for an outsourced e-mail service that constantly malfunctioned. Prudential has been using the free Standard version but Daily said that the Gmail service alone is worth the price of the Premier edition, which the company will adopt. "Everything on top of that is just a bonus," he said. Prudential will evaluate carefully how Docs & Spreadsheets compares with Excel and Word. Google acknowledges that Google Apps doesn't match the broad set of features currently in Office, which has an installed base of about 450 million users. Google Apps needs a presentation application like Office's PowerPoint, and to boost its support for offline work beyond its basic capabilities to import and export files from Docs & Spreadsheets, analysts say. Still, Microsoft must better articulate the value of Office Live, which lacks hosted versions of core Office applications like Word and Excel, said analyst Rebecca Wettemann of Nucleus Research. With the improvements in Internet connectivity, it's natural for organizations to evaluate hosted suites like Google Apps as alternatives to packaged software like Office, she said. In a recent survey, Nucleus found that 51 percent of organizations use some on-demand applications for things like CRM (customer relationship management), project management, content management, e-commerce, and collaboration, Wettemann said. Those that sign up for Google's Premier edition will get 10GB of e-mail storage per user, compared to 2GB in the Standard edition, a 99.9 percent uptime guarantee and phone support for IT administrators. It also includes APIs (application programming interfaces) to integrate the suite with business applications and data. The Standard and Education editions are also getting enhanced with the Docs & Spreadsheets integration and the BlackBerry support for Gmail. "This is a very big step forward for Google Apps," said Dave Girouard, vice president and general manager of Google's enterprise unit. The company plans to add several more applications to the suite before the year is out, and theÂ JotSpot wiki serviceÂ is a likely candidate, he said. Google believes the Premier edition can be a good complement to Office, and it sees a big opportunity in organizations that haven't been able to justify the cost of offering e-mail to some employees, particularly in retail and manufacturing, he said. Google also plans to create an ecosystem of partners and developers around Google Apps. Â