I attended an event this morning at the Westin St. Francis from the Google Enterprise team, who are trying to sell Google's existing technology to companies. See http://www.google.com/enterprise/ for details on the products.

The speaker was Michael Lock, director of North American sales. He mentioned during the talk that he worked at Oracle for 8 years.

He shared some "Observations" with the audience - I thought the points themselves were good but my overall impression was that for most of the points he made that current MS products do the same things  - but of course, they would never tell you that.

Consumer Technology Is Leading Innovation:

• YouTube
• MySpace
• Tivo
• Skype
• Blackberries (does that really count?)
• iPods

Enterprise IT is falling behind.

If we focus on User Satisfaction - user tech vs business tech - user tech is winning.

He mentioned a quote from a book called "The End of Software" by Timothy Chou.  The quote was that 75% of the budget for IT is maintenance.

There have been over 300 tech mergers and acquisitions over the last year - the industry is consolidating.

Of the top startups, 80% are business-to-consumer and only 20% are business-to-business. This is a reversal from a recent years.

"Make applications that people will love" is one of their main selling points - Google software is easy to use and extremely fast. But loving applications is not the same thing as useful applications. One key point I did not hear them really hit relates to aligning software to what people do.

Google has 12,000 employees now. They own 60% of the search market. They have 7,000 enterprise customers. There are 300 people in the enterprise group. They see their role as leveraging Google's R&D and making products that can be sold to industry. They have marketing, distribution, support, and sales organizations in place for the Enterprise group.

"3 Lessons"

1.       Fast Is Better Than Slow

a.       Rate of change vs deployment time - it takes too long to deploy solutions - by the time you deploy them, the situation has changed

b.      Make IT projects more iterative

                                      i.           Launch and improve

                                     ii.            Fail quickly and learn from it

c.       Technology must get simpler to implement

2.       Simple is Better than Complex

a.       Current delivery model is insanely complex

                                       i.            He showed a slide showing all the various servers an organization needs to provide servers / double that for redundancy and fault tolerance - the point being that when you arrive at this scenario, there is a significant amount of overhead involved with maintenance

                                     ii.            We need new delivery models

1.       Appliances

2.       Software As Service (Microsoft and others offer this, btw)

3.       Assume Chaos and Deal with it

a.       Data has changed - no longer comes in columns and rows

b.      Manual categorization and hierarchies are dead - this was the most compelling point - but Office 2007 has instant search so the point is moot

c.       Don't throw data away

d.      Encourage information to be shared and published

e.      Embrace search as navigation

They do offer the Google apps at an EXTREMELY low cost - $50 / user / year. So, for REALLY simple organizations, this could be a very useful solution, minimizing the maintenance costs.

Here also are some other reviews of the same seminar I attended:

o    http://blogs.zdnet.com/micro-markets/?p=663

o    http://www.cmswire.com/cms/enterprise-20/google-moves-further-into-the-enterprise-000926.php

Issues and Analysis:

My sense is that Google are being, surprisingly, simplistic. The set of features available in the Google apps are not - by any reach of the imagination - on par with the features available in more established products. Notwithstanding the fact that there is a significant cost to having your own servers and administering them, if a user needs one single feature that Office 2007 has, I have seen users already upgrade simply on that basis. Google's contact management is poor, they offer no task management. They have no presentation application. Even Apple has their own presentation application. Google’s suite offers no version control. They offer no workflow solution whatsoever.

When compared with the Office 2007 suite and SharePoint 2007, there is no way I would recommend Google apps to anyone who wants an "Enterprise Class" solution.

Finally, despite Google's claim that they know how to manage these systems, as I wrote this up, a friend called me to tell me that he was trying to send me a message, but his gMail was down.