Google Pushes to Control the Enterprise

May 1, 2007: Google’s VP of Enterprise Dave Girouard believes the sheer size and scale of Google will push enterprises into a world of ‘usable’ and consumer like Google applications, giving back the time to work on innovation and business development.

Opening CeBIT’s keynote sessions in Sydney this morning, Girouard pushed Google’s bid to dominate the enterprise space with its recently released arsenal of hosted applications. After expressing his beliefs on the challenges ahead for IT, the ‘Darwinian effect’ currently innovating consumer applications and the move Google is making to 'revolutionise' the IT delivery model, he then had to face up to some challenging questions from audience members.

Girouard used the opportunity to outline Google’s recent launch of Google App for businesses. Pushing the need for business IT to keep up with the innovative pace and development of consumer IT, Girouard said organisations need to move away from the complex, unusable and uninspiring currently on the market.

“The IT industry has been Spartan and desolate for some time but there are a few things that are going to change that,” he said.

Girouard believes business success can thrive off the dominance and the power of Google that is so great, its applications can offer organisations back the simplicity, management and time they need to get on with their own innovation and business development.

But at the end of his presentation, a representative from AMP stood up to express her disappointment at the difficulties in actually contacting Google to enquire about such applications. The AMP representative said it took three months to get a response out of Google and asked Girouard if Google actually had the manpower to keep up with the speed of its growing demand. Girouard went on to apologise on behalf of Google, stating it’s not their intention to ignore public requests and admitting Google’s public profile was actually larger than the resources they have to manage it.

With figures quoted from Gartner suggesting 75 percent of IT budgets are spent purely on maintenance, Girouard listed innovation as “really only a luxury, something you can think of once you’ve done everything else." Girouard praised the software-as-a-service model and suggested only large, global organisations like Google have the capacity to offer disaster proof, completely managed solutions with consumer friendly functionality that organisational employees will actually use.

Of course there is always the reluctance to have a third party hosting applications and services, a reluctance that Girouard compares to user reactions of banks in the past. “A long time ago, people used to keep money under a mattress, it seemed crazy to put it in a bank,” he said.

For Google, entering the enterprise space is a matter of building on consumer based applications and reviewing their usability. “In the consumer space, usability is up there, but with business technology it gets less and less usable everyday,” he said. “Anybody who succeeds in the consumer world does so because they pay attention to what the user actually wants. It’s like an open market.”

Girouard goes on to compare the Google search interface of 1997 to the interface of 2007. Besides a few slight differences, the interfaces are very much the same with both still featuring the now familiar colours, fonts and white spaces of all that is Google. “We slimmed gown the letters, got rid of the exclamation mark (Google!) because we figured users could decide for themselves if they wanted to get excited about using Google, but it’s more or less the same.”

Ultimately under a SaaS or hosted model, Girouard believes the Google dominated consumer space makes it the right choice for organisations looking to update their enterprise applications with user-centric designs and proven usability. “It’s hard to do these things unless you’re at a true scale,” he said. “When you ride the curve of SaaS, you’re leveraging the energy they put in.”

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