Friday, November 21, 2008
What IS the "Hidden" Cost of Google Apps?
Carl Krupitzer
Google Apps Disastrous? Certainly possible. But the potential for disaster DOES NOT lie in the product itself, but rather in how an organization introduces change. In the article Blum describe his users as "struggling", flat-out refusing to use the application, and floundering with login issues (which in his defense can be confusing...I'll clarify and offer some hints on that later). Appirio, on the other hand, has executed successful Google Apps migrations for extremely large companies. The cost savings have been in the millions. The most recent was a large biotech company which migrated their entire corporation from Oracle calendar to GCal. The migration was hugely successful, with 9,800 users successfully logged in on the first morning to do their work.
So the question really is "what's different?" How did a company of thousands migrate users successfully while Blum had near rebellion with 12?
The answer: a carefully planned rollout and an understanding that you are changing the game for your workers. Our customer took the time to identify champions and put forth a thoughtful communications and training campaign. They made change exciting and fun for their community. The results spoke for themselves. The support war room that had been planned to be open for several weeks after the deployment was closed because of lack of issues within 2 days.
Our tough message for Jonathan Blum? You are asking your users to step away from the very tools that make them productive on a daily basis. You have to plan and train people for that change. You can't just "throw out" their tools and expect them to maintain their current work load, while learning new tools, and remember a long URL string! Over the last decade, employees have invested time and energy in becoming proficient and productive with MS Office. These type of communication and collaboration solutions are truly core to our productivity as knowledge workers. Change is never fun-- investing in the training and development of your staff is necessary to keep them innovating and productive.
Google Apps represents a shift in mindset as much as it is a replacement of a tool. Instead of rolling out Apps with "tough love," you should encourage the adoption and foster the creativity that this tool set promises to deliver. Recognize that employees want to do good work and be productive, and give them tools like Google Apps that millions of consumers love to use.
But back to the login issue that Blum highlights in his article: No doubt at first glance the login situation with Google is confusing. You have the concept of personal Google Accounts and your Enterprise Apps accounts, and the two things can and often do have the same account name and password. A personal Google Account is similar to MS Passport, simply a means of verifying your identity. To add to the confusion you often do have many different logins for different services Google offers. It is clearly an area that has caused frustration for users and something that Google will have to address eventually.
Much of the confusion can be eliminated however during the provisioning of your Apps instance. Setting up any messaging infrastructure takes planning and consideration. Google has included some great tools to help including Single Sign On support and the ability to restrict access to a certain IP range. Many partners including Appirio, have created tools to bulk provision large numbers of accounts and provide synchronization with Identity Management systems such as Active Directory. Apps is a sophisticated solution and one that can and does meet the needs of many organizations. All it takes is a planning!
Here is some tactical advice to help Blumsday (free of charge!)
- Create a Cname record, and train users to go to "mail.blumsday.com" for email. It is much more intuitive than "www.google.com/a/blumsday.com/
mail" - Spend some time and train your users. If all of your employees are spending 30 mins a day, it won't take much effort to improve their efficiency and your ROI by delivering a training class or two. Poll your users on what their issues are and address them...stop making them frustrated and unproductive!
- Create help desk procedures. Treat Google Apps support just as seriously as you would any installed software support issues.
At the end of the day, Google Apps is not complicated-- the feature set is actually far simpler than the MS Office counterparts. This simplicity of user experience, however, supports collaboration features that will change how your people work. Video chat, corporate video sharing, online presentation capabilities, having multiple people work on a single version of a document at the same time... all in a package which gets better and better automatically every quarter. Throw in the ability to shut off the Exchange servers and stop sending back up tapes to offsite storage, and the story becomes simply amazing for $50/year.
The business case for Google Apps is fool proof - unless you approach the change and migration foolishly.
Labels: Cloud Computing, Google, Google Apps, Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft Office, Software as a Service, Video Chat
Monday, November 17, 2008
Microsoft and On-premise - Billions of Dollars Behind Google and Growing?
Narinder Singh
Last week Google launched embedded video chat from within Gmail and chat. First of all, wow. It has been an instant hit at Appirio and other customers of Google Apps. Immediately you can get crystal clear video and voice without almost any effort (especially true for Mac users with our built in cameras). We've used it to connect our teams across the country and with India and Japan. It dramatically changes the communication experience because Google streamlined the user experience to make it simple to connect with anyone - inside or outside your company. In our very first video connections, our attention actually turned to this as another extreme example of the innovation gap between on-premise software and "the cloud". Rumor has it that even group video chat will be coming soon.
What would it take Microsoft to add such a capability into their traditional Exchange platform? How long until end users at customers would actually benefit from it?1. Microsoft would have to build and test it - Given all the different versions of their software, hardware, OS combinations facing Microsoft, they would have to make some very tough choices or severely limit the options they supported. Given the precedent of Vista compatibility, this enormity of this can not be underestimated. Conservatively, it would take them more than 10x the effort for Google to do the same thing within Exchange.
2. Customers would have to then get the new version and upgrade all Exchange instances - With Google, it basically was a couple clicks and it worked. For Exchange / Outlook customers they would have to upgrade or install completely new software. If they wanted to chat with those outside their company, they would have to hope those folks had also upgraded.
With an estimated 500M Outlook users, lets assume that the fully loaded cost of the upgrade (license, support, rollout on the server and to each client) will be just $10 per user (an incredibly conservative number in our opinion). That means it would cost businesses at least $5 billion to gain the functionality Google just rolled out in a day. The likely case is that this would also take years to take hold, severely limiting the benefits because not everyone was on the same version immediately. You would have to wait for your friends company's to rollout the "new version" so that you could video chat cross company (or naively hope that Microsoft actually built it using a standards based approach).
3. They would have to fix security and synchronization problems - What major new capability released from Microsoft doesn't create new security holes? Lets say that 500M users represented 5M companies each of whom had to spend an additional $1000 (1-2 days over a year) to deal with the security patches, and the subsequent synchronization to OS, SQL Server, Exchange version, that would be needed. That's another $5 billion down the tubes. For Google, even when problems do arise, they are fixed by Google, once, for all customers (without the customer having to take any action).
At a recent private event of medium size enterprise CIOs, one of the most senior Microsoft executives was left struggling to explain why a company should continue to invest in Exchange when Google was providing a broader (and growing) set of capabilities for 1-2 orders of magnitude less expense than Microsoft (Google Apps for mail, calendar, chat, docs, and sites lists for $50/user/year). The realities of attempting to preserve revenues from a legacy solution while promoting the new model is too much inner conflict for even Microsoft to wade through. As we have said before, the most likely path for company's like Microsoft to "transition to the cloud" is to set up an independent unit that can compete freely with their own solutions.
In the last year, Google has added more innovation to the messaging and collaboration space than Microsoft has in the last decade. To do this at a fraction of the cost for themselves and customers highlights the radical difference and inherent conflicts in on-premise vs. on-demand. With the current economic conditions, we expect to see a large set of studies and research that drill home the simple fact that real multi-tenant SaaS/PaaS solutions deliver much more value for a dramatically lower cost for both the provider and consumer. IT is simply too important and too costly to be left with solutions of a pre-Internet world.
Labels: Cloud Computing, Google Apps, Innovation, Microsoft Azure, SaaS, Video Chat
Monday, November 03, 2008
Salesforce and Facebook: Connecting the Cloud
We loved today's virtual bear hug between Marc Benioff of Salesforce.com and Sheryl Sandburg of Facebook at Dreamforce. It reminded us of the embrace between Marc and Eric Schmidt of Google back in April, for a couple of reasons:
- Another cloud to connect: There are 110 million active users of Facebook... many of these people also find time to work in between their wall postings. Facebook is an open, on-demand application platform, much like Force.com.
- Further consumerization of enterprise IT: Consumers have become accustomed to using the incredible power of social networks to connect with old friends and family in their personal life. Now, with Salesforce and Facebook together, these same people can use the power of this same social network to get their job done.
- Not just demos: People have talked about bringing the social network to the enterprise every day since "Enterprise 2.0" hit the radar. But today's announcement went further-- we saw real business scenarios with the potential to create enormous value for the enterprise. We are thrilled to be part of all this-- we built the recruiting scenario shown by Marc and Sheryl on stage. This is a preview of an application we think every HR head needs to consider.
Labels: cloud, Dreamforce, facebook, keynote, salesforce
Narinder Singh
In today's keynote and as reported recently, salesforce.com released the capability to create and run web based apps available to those outside of your company. There were a ton of cool demonstrations shown today and we built many of them (Harrah's, Facebook). We'll highlight those in our Dreamforce Central Blog, but we want to focus on a more subtle point - the rate of innovation and the pace at which it impacts customers.
1. The high rate of innovation of salesforce.com (and other cloud providers) - Two years ago it was Apex code, that allowed real business logic; last year it was Visual Force, that allowed full control over the user experience; this year they announce salesforce sites; allowing you take your apps and expose part or all of them to web users. No enterprise software vendor has come close to matching this pace over the same period of time.
2. The rate at which innovations actually impact customers - In typical on-premise software, even cool new things will require a generation to get into the hands of customers. Already 11 million of Apex Code and more than 50,000 Visual Force pages have been written by salesforce.com customers. We have used both with more than 50 enterprise customers in mission critical apps.
The fact that these two factors can occur while reducing overall IT costs at first glance seems like black magic. But this is in fact the ultimate testament to how different cloud computing is from old world and how far Microsoft, SAP, Oracle and others have to come. You can get started with trying out salesforce and getting started with a trial of all of this in 60 seconds.
How long will it take the others to match that? We have always been fans of cloud computing, but even I sit back stunned at how far the gap is between the old world and the new
Labels: Amazon Web Services, facebook, Force.com, harrah's, salesforce.com
