We've covered the launch of Google's new browser Chrome extensively this week. But as we near the end of the week, one of the questions yet to be answered is how Chrome will fare in the enterprise. As we all know Google is making a strong push into the enterprise with Google Apps, which received a further boost this week with the launch of Google Video for Business. However, there is a lot of work needed to get Chrome ready for the office. Already our readers have noticed compatibility and usability issues that will hamper enterprise adoption.
I'm at the Office 2.0 conference in San Francisco, where day 1 has just concluded. As with all conferences, the most valuable parts have been the discussions outside of sessions. And I can tell you that the corridors have been humming here. The conference is a who's who of business-centric cloud computing - everyone here believes that the future will exist in the clouds.
Here are some of the sessions I've enjoyed today, including the Google keynote, Project Management 2.0, and Money 2.0 (with video embedded below)...
A growing part of the software sales process involves offering trials or try-before-you-buy programs. Buyers love it, but it puts pressure on the vendors to deliver during this important process. I recently trialed software from Vertical Response, which offers self-service email marketing. I needed a way to create, send, and analyze our email campaigns. So I signed up and the product ended up doing a great job across the board. Here then are some lessons learned going through the process as a buyer.
Today Google is launching a new product for the enterprise market, Google Video for business. It's a new application in the Google Apps office suite, enabling workers to upload and share videos inside their organizations. Videos can be shared on an individual, group or company-wide basis. Google sees it being used for such things as executive communications, product training, trip reports, "social videos" for the company intranet.
We think this has the potential to break open the Web Office market, because up till now nobody has done rich media for the enterprise as an easy to use browser-based package. Google Video for Business manages to do this, mostly because of YouTube's influence.
We ran a poll a year ago asking which word processing tool you used the most. What we were really driving at was: how many of you are using an online word processing service (Google Docs, Zoho, ThinkFree, etc) as your main tool, instead of a traditional desktop one (MS Word, OpenOffice, etc). The results surprised us a bit: MS Word got an overwhelming 46% of the vote, with OpenOffice next on 17%. The best of the online breed was Google Docs, with 11%. Perhaps we shouldn't have been surprised, given that Web Office is still relatively new and not entirely reliable yet. Still, we're keen to know if things have changed over the past year. Please participate in the poll below...
According to Forrester Research, we're in the initial phases of a new 16-year cycle of technology innovation and growth called "IT Everywhere." This shift comes on the heels of the previous cycle which brought us networked computing technologies for our enterprise applications and the Internet. During this transitional period, CIOs need to be aware of which trends from the older cycle are still important and which of the new trends they should also be paying attention to. Forrester has summed up their findings in a recent report which focuses on these emerging trends.
Yesterday we wrote about Enterprise 2.0 from the point of view of the Enterprise, the buyer. The conclusion was that the impact of social media on the Enterprise was very big, addressing the very "nature of the firm". This post looks at Enterprise 2.0 from the point of view of the vendor, specifically startups. This is a 30,000 foot view, but we aim to get past the hype to insights you can use in your startup. Further posts in our recently launched Enterprise Chanel will drill into specific market segments, companies and technologies.
The break-up of behemoth, vertically integrated enterprises commenced in the 1970's, got a boost from junk bond financing in the 1980's, and accelerated in the 1990's with globalization. Now, late in the 2000's, Social Media (aka Web 2.0) is adding another gear that will accelerate the fundamental restructuring of the enterprise.
This is a big story. That is why ReadWriteWeb is dedicating a new "channel" to Enterprise 2.0. I will be editing this channel and we are looking for part time writers to contribute. More on that later.
Google had a bad week in cloud computing, with serious downtime in Gmail, Blogger and Spreadsheet. Back in July it was Amazon that was embarrassed with their S3 outage. If you measure on total downtime, cloud computing still looks good compared to traditional hosting or in-house data centers. But that glosses over the psychological and market confidence issues, when a problem hits everybody at the same time. In contrast, when was the last time you heard about a massive Skype outage? Maybe it is time to look more seriously at P2P?
ReadWriteWeb is a partner with Defrag, a conference about web innovation. Defrag's Eric Norlin has lately been blogging about enterprises and organizations starting to move beyond mere 'cost containment' (although that's still a big driver) and into using web technologies to boost productivity. Eric points out that "taming the data" is one of the challenges of this shift, because there is so much information online which workers need to process. And it's not just taming the data, but gleaning 'intelligence' from it. He mentions a number of buzzwords: enterprise 2.0, semantic web, business intelligence. Eric's main point is that this space is wide open for innovation - going beyond Webex, social networks and so on.
Part of the problem in the enterprise/business market is the predominance of big, bulky software from large IT vendors such as Microsoft, IBM, Cisco and Oracle. Although most of those companies are slowly evolving into offering web-based software (Cisco owns Webex for example), it tends to be slow progress from all the bigcos except for Google. But nowadays we're seeing startups making a significant impact in the enterprise. There are two main ways this is happening...
