The role of Google Apps in business.

It has been about 2 years since several consultants and myself started taking Google Apps seriously, very seriously. The Cloud Computing vendor landscape seemed very complicated to the point of being overwhelming when we first started studying it. It probably took nearly a year before it finally clicked - and it's not complicated.

Let's just talk about the basics - email, instant messenger (IM), calendars, spreadsheets and an intranet. For all the noise on the net and among experts, many companies do a poor job in these 5 simple areas. From the billion dollar firm that lost email for the better part of a week and many users' email history forever due to a SAN failure and improper DR practices to any BNI or ACA networking meeting where 50% or more of the attendees will use @yahoo or @aol, etc for their business email address. Business processes still fail to fully utilize these basic IT services to their potential - this is especially true in small and medium sized businesses. Even in some of the world's best organizations email is still the dominate application used for workflow, records and doc management, surveys/polling, scheduling, collaboration, communication etc. What would happen to our world if an all out ban on emailing Excel spreadsheets was suddenly implemented - our world would grind to a halt.

The current standard for these basic applications is Microsoft; Exchange Server, Communications Server, Active Directory, and Office. Is this terribly complicated to implement - well, as always, it depends. Should a closet be a data center? No, it shouldn't. Should larger firms be dedicating capital to purchase, support, maintain, and upgrade commodity applications? No, they shouldn't. Many SMB and Enterprise firms do not fully utilize these basic applications currently because although they are available, they are too resource intensive - too much capital and too much time are required to support the products that enable the most basic of services for users. A closet is not a data center and IT services are not a core competency (the firm exists to provide some other good or service) so what next? For decades expensive and complex solutions were really the only viable option. However, this is no longer the case. Enter Google Apps.

Could 98% of SMB in the US improve their IT environment substantially by implementing Google Apps Premier or Standard? Should every large Enterprise in US be providing Google Apps Premier as a viable tool set to their users? Absolutely! Enterprise IT orgs should be focusing on enablement, not control. IT orgs exist, without exception, only to serve the business. The resources of Google Apps can be provisioned as the firm deems appropriate. For example, a firm can utilize an internal email system while delivering the rest of the Google Apps suite to users. Google Sites and Spreadsheets are two apps that no firm, large or small, should be living without. In the largest enterprise the reduced amount of email alone that Google Apps adoption can enable will pay for the service fee. To get the most bang, stop spending capital to deliver commodity technology like email - this is incredibly wasteful.


There are always many options but the the next decade of dominance in general purpose productivity applications within business already belongs to Google Apps.