How Google Apps is Accelerating the "Revolution at the Edge"
August 29, 2012
3 minute read
Yesterday’s blog post by Tidemark CEO and Founder Christian Gheorghe, entitled “Revolution at the Edge” and published on the blog of Ben Horowitz (co-founder of VC firm Andreessen Horowitz), compared the current enterprise IT revolution to the Romanian revolution in which Communism was defeated and the people of Romania were liberated.
The enterprise IT revolution he refers to, which Google Apps sits firmly in the middle of, is set to free thousands of companies and millions of workers from what Gheorghe calls the Wintel duopoly, a world in which CIOs and IT departments (and thus entire businesses) are dependent upon two stagnant and subpar technology systems and spend up to 80% of their time just maintaining status quo.
The post discusses how in the future (and for some businesses, the present), the IT department and CIO will focus exclusively on analyzing data, building and deploying scalable applications, enabling aspects of technology that add value to the company and creating open channels for communication and this is all possible because of three breakthrough revolutions: Cloud, Mobile and Social.
We believe that Google Apps, a completely web-based messaging and collaboration suite, is making huge strides in these three areas of enterprise IT and thus is helping today’s CIOs embrace the revolution.
Cloud
Google Apps is run completely in the cloud with all server and data management outsourced to Google. An entirely outsourced IT infrastructure alleviates the need to provision hardware for each user, update software licenses and tend to bugs. With Google Apps and its corresponding Chrome browser, updates and fixes are pushed to users in the background and accounts and applications can be provisioned in minutes. Google Apps saves the IT team countless hours of work and allows more focus to be placed on what Gheorghe claims to be the future of IT: analyzing, building, deploying, enabling and communicating.
According to Gheorghe, “cloud computing magically removes the largest organizational constraints to adopting new capabilities: the costs to deploy, maintain and train people on enterprise software.” Google Apps, offered at just $50 per user per year, virtually eliminates barriers to adoption for even the smallest companies. There are virtually no maintenance costs and with a majority of users already familiar with Google Apps’ consumer cousin, Gmail, training time is minimal.
Mobile
Gheorghe argues that Apple’s iPhone revolutionized the workspace and helped usher in a mobile first world, clearly seen through the prevalence of policies like BYOD and the growing ability to work from anywhere. As a completely web-based product with advanced collaboration tools, Google Apps creates a truly mobile-first, collaborative environment, where working in disparate offices, states or even countries feels like working in the same room.
Google’s Android mobile OS and a host of corresponding mobile applications (available on both iOS and Android) like Gmail, Google Drive and Google Talk make accessing the entire Apps suite on the go easy. Not to mention Google Apps provides customers with a robust set of mobile device management capabilities at no additional cost.
Social
Google’s social network, Google+, may have been late to the game, but the network is quickly proving itself among old standbys and with integrations between Google+ and Google Apps growing stronger each day, the network may just prove to be the best innovation in social enterprise yet. Though Gheorghe refers to Yammer, Jive and Salesforce.com’s Chatter, a clear case can be made for Google+’s impending domination of social enterprise.
Just today, Google upped its enterprise appeal with the introduction of Google+ tools for business (you can now add a Hangout to a Calendar event) and last month, Google replaced video conferencing in Google Talk in an effort to push more users to the network. When enabled on a Google Apps domain, each user on that domain automatically receives a Google+ account. With over 50 million users already on the Apps platform, the potential for Google+’s growth, particularly in the workplace, is astronomical.
