August 3rd, 2009
Google Apps isn't about CIOs
Larry Dignan wrote a piece on Google’s new push to get their Apps products into the enterprise. He pointed out major sources of potential problems for Google in this space, particularly the inability of companies to host their own data. As Larry very correctly noted,
If you’re in a heavily regulated industry you’re not going to be emailing Google’s helpdesk trying to track a 2006 email to satisfy a Sarbanes-Oxley requirement.
Going on to quote Microsoft’s Kevin Turner,
Customers don’t want 100 percent of every piece of data for every application managed in the Cloud. They simply don’t.
Of course, as someone who just deployed Google Apps for my organization I have a completely different perspective. Relative to the sorts of companies about which Larry is talking, my district is quite small. If it was a company, it would have less than 2500 employees (assuming that students were employees, given that they have IT needs just like an employee in a corporation might). The 1.75 million businesses that Google says are switching to Apps, however, are a lot more like my organization than Fortune 500 companies who worry about things like Sarbanes-Oxley.
There are a lot of companies (mine included) who want to host as much in the cloud and worry about as little internally as possible. I’m the closest thing my organization has to a CIO; many of those 1.75 million businesses don’t even have a geeky blogger running the IT show, much less a Chief Information Officer. They certainly don’t have the resources to manage Exchange servers and host and manage the sorts of tools that Google Apps can provide in a turnkey solution.
Google Apps may some day break into very large-scale enterprises. Good for them. Whatever. I’m far more concerned about enabling communication and collaboration in a really cost-effective way for my users that is also easy for me, easy for the users, and easy for my very limited tech support staff. If I’m Toyota, I’m going to think twice before jumping into the Apps game and relying on the cloud. If I’m on the Mom-and-Pop to SMB (including most school districts) spectrum, then Apps starts looking a lot less worrisome and a lot more attractive.
Follow Chris Dawson on Twitter! Christopher Dawson is the technology director for the Athol-Royalston School District in northern Massachusetts and a member of the Internet Press Guild. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations, but always keep in mind that the opinions expressed here are his own and not those of his daytime employer, even if he talks incessantly about his day job.
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