Google Apps manager: Google hearts IT managers
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(InfoWorld) - With the launch of the Google Apps suite last year, Google became a provider of hosted collaboration and communication software for small and medium-size organizations, and it made clear its aspirations to lure large-company IT managers and CIOs with the suite'sÂ Premier Edition, introduced in February. This move, which puts it in direct competition with software heavyweights like Microsoft, builds on Google's first steps as an enterprise vendor years ago when it launched its first enterprise search product. Although Google generates most of its revenue from search engine advertising, it says it is committed to the IT enterprise space. IDG News Service recently had a chance to talk to Rajen Sheth, Google Apps product manager, about the challenges and opportunities Google sees in enterprise software. Following is an edited version of the interview: IDGNS: Does Google's Enterprise unit have a good understanding of the needs of IT managers and CIOs? Sheth: I think we do. We're breaking new ground in some of these areas, for example with Apps and the concept of hosted applications for large companies. We're learning as the industry is learning in some areas. In our Enterprise division, everyone has worked at a significant enterprise company before, from the sales force to product management and engineers. They all know what it means to be an enterprise company and to build enterprise products. That said, you'll see us do things differently from other enterprise organizations in the ways we build products and roll things out, and you see that already with the Search Appliance and with Apps. IDGNS: How big of an issue are government regulations when you offer hosted applications and you store customers' data, particularly for customers in heavily regulated industries like health care and financial services? Sheth: We've added functionality like the ability to put a mail gateway in front of Google [Apps] to filter all your incoming and outgoing mail and also archive it. That's important for financial services companies that need to archive mail for six or seven years and can't let e-mail messages that, for example, contain social security numbers go out. IDGNS: You have made an uptime commitment for Gmail of 99.9 percent availability, and yet you have had several Gmail outages affecting Premier Edition customers. Sheth: Several of the things we hit were anomalies right after our launch, unfortunately. We have done pretty deep postmortems on them, and we're using those experiences to improve the product and what we do. [These incidents] have helped us examine the whole process and think of other things we're going to do. For example, regarding notification to customers, we're working through a variety of processes by which we can further give customers visibility into what's going on with their systems, expected recovery times, current status, and things like that. IDGNS: Are you thinking of beefing up phone support? Sheth: We offer 24 by 7 phone support with the Premier Edition. We're scaling that team more and more. We have a combination there of front-line support and enterprise support engineers. Similar to how we support very high-end customers of the Search Appliance, I think we can do the same for Google Apps. IDGNS: Becoming a Premier Edition customer is pretty inexpensive at $50 per user per year. Have you been hit with a tidal wave of signups? Can you support the volume of customers you're getting? Sheth: The uptake and interest have been very good, but we were expecting it. We were scaling up the team and the resources, so we were able to handle it quite well. In terms of scalability of our systems, it's something we're tremendously good at. Even if we add a 100,000-person corporation, it's still a very small fraction of the entire user base, so we can scale up our systems pretty easily. The [consumer] services that we offer are already scaled up to very high degrees. We have tens of millions of Gmail users, for example. In terms of support, we started scaling up that organization a while ago to meet the demand we have now. IDGNS: Any plans to create desktop clients to give offline support to Google Apps? Sheth: The offline experience is definitely a hole in the product. It's something we're exploring in various ways. Right now, we let people import and export to a [third party] offline client. That's adequate, but it's not the endgame. There's nothing I can talk about right now in detail [regarding future plans]. IDGNS: Many express concern over data security in hosted applications in general. How do you address those concerns? Sheth: Security has been part of Google's development and operational philosophies from the very start. We've taken a lot of measures to protect the data centers and the infrastructure from external attacks. Also, Premier Edition lets customers apply their security policies on top of the Google applications. For example, you can use your own authentication systems so that a company that requires employees to sign in to their e-mail by putting a fingerprint against something can implement that with Google Apps. You can also lock all of the applications to be encrypted and make it such that it's all talking over HTTPS so that the level of encryption we have for your e-mail and chat sessions is the same you would use for a stock transaction. IDGNS: How are you doing in terms of mobile access to Google Apps? Sheth: It's definitely an area of focus. We have a pretty good reach for Gmail right now with the Gmail mobile application and Gmail mobile browser experience. We're continuing to think across all the applications and figure out how to make the experience better and better on mobile devices. In general, mobile access is an extremely important thing to Google because in so many parts of the world, more people access the Internet by mobile devices than they do by a laptop or PC. IDGNS: Are you interested in including vertical applications in Google Apps, maybe as options to customers in certain industries? Sheth: Our forte and user benefit is in applications that have a very broad appeal, especially within collaboration. That's where you will see a lot of the emphasis. That said, I've been pleasantly surprised about the amount of development that has happened on top of Google Apps since its release. We want to continue encouraging developers to take our platform and a lot of our core components and extend them.ADVERTISEMENTIBM Information On Demand 2006Industrial Industry Leaders, please join us at IBM's premier information management global event, IBM Information On Demand 2006, October 15-20, Anaheim, CA. More IBM business and technical solutions content in one place than ever before! Select from  over 800 sessions. Register today!
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InfoWorld - Google pushed further into the communication and collaboration applications market with a major upgrade Thursday of Google Apps, a hosted suite for organizations of all sizes that analysts say could soon become a real competitor to Microsoft Office.
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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
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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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Google today launched a spiffed-up version of Google Apps, its free Office-like suite of programs. This follows by two days its introduction of a new e-mail management service. Both are tailored for small businesses, schools and non-profit agencies. Normally, these moves would draw scant notice. But as Microsoft tries to absorb Yahoo - the better to make inroads into Internet advertising - Google is moving ahead with initiatives to claw its way onto Microsoft turf.
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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.
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Users at small businesses had good things to say about the free, Web-based Google Apps for Your Domain beta which became available this week.
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By releasing a Web-based subscription package called Google Apps, the search giant goes right for Bill Gatesâs gut
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Google has partnered with Capgemini to provide large businesses with IT support for Google Apps Premier Edition.
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User-generated IT support I have lived through re-orgs, outsourcing and off-the-shelf applications being shoehorned into niche markets by over-zealous management. The latest trend in software, though, is for user-generated mashups.â¦