{"id":319,"date":"2009-03-27T15:30:44","date_gmt":"2009-03-27T15:30:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/?p=319"},"modified":"2009-03-27T15:40:08","modified_gmt":"2009-03-27T15:40:08","slug":"if-i-was-google","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/2009\/03\/27\/if-i-was-google\/","title":{"rendered":"If I was Google…"},"content":{"rendered":"

Google<\/a> is I giant, there\u2019s no denying that, but one area where they are only just beginning to make inroads is enterprise IT.\u00a0 It\u2019s pretty obvious this is where they want to be<\/a>, after all there\u2019s a huge market to be had there.\u00a0 A market currently dominated by Microsoft and the thousands of partners that the MS ecosystem supports.<\/p>\n

On the face of it Google have a pretty good suite of products for business.\u00a0 It covers pretty much everything you would need in terms of messaging (email<\/a>, Calendar<\/a>, Instant Messaging, Conferencing, email security and spam filtering<\/a>) and collaboration (word processing, spreadsheets, presentations<\/a>, video<\/a>) with large storage allowances and very competitive pricing at $50 per user per year.\u00a0 Certainly if you were a new business you\u2019d have pretty much everything you\u2019d need for very little up-front cost.<\/p>\n

The pricing of the Google services is key.\u00a0 $50 dollars per user per year for the fully suite of apps, a mailbox, and 25GB of storage for mail and documents is very<\/em> cheap.\u00a0 As a comparison MS\u2019s current hosted Exchange model<\/a> is $10 per user per month just for a 5GB mail box.\u00a0 You can bundle<\/a> in SharePoint, Office Communications Server and Live Meeting for a cost of $15 dollars per user per month, but you\u2019d still need to buy MS Office (or equivalent) for each user.<\/p>\n

To my mind there are two main obstacles that Google will need to overcome in order to quickly gain some of the enterprise market.\u00a0<\/p>\n

First the the concept of having everything in the cloud.\u00a0 Traditionally companies will have built and managed their own systems for mail, storage, etc.\u00a0 It\u2019s a big jump to start giving that up and relying on services you can\u2019t see or touch in the cloud.\u00a0 Fortunately most companies are now becoming more open to this, at least for things that can now be considered as \u2018commodity\u2019 services like email.\u00a0 The current economic climate is, if anything, helping cloud services gain some traction.\u00a0 Companies will be very reluctant to go spending Capex on new servers.\u00a0 If a service provider can offer the same or better service , with no capital outlay and vastly reduced operational costs (you don\u2019t need to manage servers you don\u2019t own or host) then that’s a very attractive option.\u00a0 The arguments for and against cloud computing have been done over and over so I won\u2019t go into them again here.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The second obstacle for Google, in my view at least, is that most people working for companies now will simply be used to Microsoft Office.\u00a0 Like it or hate it, Office is the probably the single most important app in many companies.\u00a0 I know from experience that any suggestion of changing it \u2013 even just for a new version \u2013 has a very serious change management exercise ahead if it\u2019s going to succeed.\u00a0 Moving from Office is going to put a lot of people off of going to a Google Apps solution.\u00a0<\/p>\n

So what would I do?\u00a0 Well I think Google has a lot going for it in its search for the enterprise market.\u00a0 Strangely one advantage is that MS themselves are about to change the way people can buy Exchange.\u00a0 As well as a boxed version you\u2019ll buy and install yourself they\u2019ll be selling it as a hosted\/managed service.\u00a0 So once Exchange 14<\/a> arrives people will have to start considering cloud services anyway.\u00a0 Google need to get themselves positioned in peoples minds as the natural alternative to Exchange 14.\u00a0 Not only in terms of functionality and cost, but in terms of ease of migration.\u00a0 For some they already are, but it\u2019s not yet an obvious<\/em> decision.<\/p>\n

To do that I think that they need to do a few things.<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Make using Google Mail on the backend completely transparent to Outlook users.\u00a0 Provide a MAPI<\/a> interface into Google Mail, and make Outlook on Google Mail supports all the same functionality as Exchange.\u00a0 Things like delegates on mailboxes and calendars may not be used by most, but those that do use them are likely to be important people and their secretaries.\u00a0 If your project is going to be seen as a success you want to keep the PA\u2019s happy<\/a>.\u00a0 I understand that a MAPI interface is coming, but quite how fully featured I\u2019m not sure.<\/li>\n
  2. Provide native support for mobile devices.\u00a0 Whilst the web and Google mobile clients are good, people are used to using the native inbox, contact and calendar tools on their phones.\u00a0 POP and IMAP support helps, but \u2018Push\u2019 email is often seen as important and support for the MS ActiveSync protocol would tick a lot of boxes, especially for Windows Mobile and iPhone.\u00a0 Again, I understand it will be available for mail, calendar and contacts at some point this year.<\/li>\n
  3. Improve the out-the-box tools that are available for migration and ongoing operations.\u00a0 Whilst Google’s API\u2019s<\/a> are very good, and will allow you to do most thing you\u2019d want to do, there don\u2019t seem to be many fully featured tools to help migrate hundreds or thousands of mailboxes or calendars.\u00a0 Whilst changing Exchange isn\u2019t always simple, it is a known quantity.\u00a0 Personally I\u2019d like to see Google provide a good toolset and not refer back to API\u2019s.\u00a0 It\u2019ll help them gain the support of the IT guys on the ground.\u00a0 Maybe these things exist and I\u2019ve not stumbled across them yet?<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    If Google can become an accepted host for mailboxes with an Outlook client, it\u2019s then a much smaller jump for companies to start using the wider Google Apps package.\u00a0<\/p>\n

    If as part of your $50 a year mail solution you\u2019ve also got access to 25GB of collaborative document storage and some office apps to work with, you\u2019d have to think very seriously the next time you MS licensing agreement come around.\u00a0<\/p>\n

    Whilst Google Apps isn\u2019t going to be a 100% fit for everyone (even within Google!), there\u2019d be a lot of savings there if a subsection of the user base could get by with Google Apps rather than MS Office.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Google is chasing the enterprise business that microsoft currently dominates. What would I do if I were them to get that my foot in the door?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[243,35,106,21,242,121,13,93,244],"class_list":["post-319","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tech","tag-bpos","tag-enterprise","tag-exchange","tag-google","tag-google-apps","tag-iphone","tag-microsoft","tag-office","tag-outlook","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/319","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=319"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/319\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":321,"href":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/319\/revisions\/321"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=319"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=319"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=319"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}