Watcha Gonna Do, Watcha Gonna Do When Google Comes For You?

First thing this morning, I received my daily update from eWeek, and it had a great interview with Matt Glotzbach, Product Management Director for Google’s Enterprise Division. The interview covers quite a bit, from Google’s recent IMAP for Gmail announcement, its perspective on application delivery (SaaS), its product development efforts separate from the consumer side, its foray in mobile applications, and interoperability. Yeah pretty much everything and the kitchen sink.

I want to focus on one question during the interview, at one point Matt is asked directly, there's some perception that the technologies you're using in Google Enterprise are hand-me-downs from the consumer side. So, there is innovation going on in Google's enterprise business? Matt proceeds to discuss their recent acquisition:

On the acquisition front, we recently acquired Postini, and that was purely an enterprise piece. Postini's security services are not necessarily that germane to the average consumer. What we quickly did was looked across the board and said, What are the really unique and interesting things that Postini has to offer [so] that, when we put the Google technology and the Postini technology together, you really get a one-plus-one equals three capability?
Postini's capabilities include legal compliance, archiving and data retention. The integration of the Postini capabilities on top of Gmail and Google Apps for businesses was one of the primary motivations of that acquisition. The idea was being able to provide all of those facilities to a customer still in a software-as-a-service model, where you didn't have to maintain your own servers for the purpose of legal discovery and backup. There are very real policy issues that we believe we have good answers to.

Clearly Google is serious about enterprise, though when it launched its Google Apps, this wasn’t a surprise. But what has always stuck out in my head is the development process for them. On the consumer side we’ve all read story after story about how they look internally for those new and unique apps that can be incorporated or spun-off as a new business line. They’re also acquisition hungry, eagerly seeking the next major innovation that they can bring into their enterprise. But while acquisitions can lead to great products for their enterprise business, what’s happening with natural development based on client feedback.

I’ve worked with some of the big vendors out there, SAP, IBM, and Microsoft and so forth and so on. All have built a strong consulting business that is focused on understanding the needs of their clients. In some instances this is backed by great internal development teams, and where they don’t have one, they find the right development partners. But their core strength has always been their ability to look under the hood of a business, study it from the inside out and help it to determine what applications it truly needs. Now that’s not to say this is always the fastest of processes, with lead times that can even stretch for years.

I can remember when Windows 2000 Server launched. Microsoft was everywhere, meetings upon meetings with IT teams across the country, helping them to understand how it worked, how to work with it, and its value to the organization. This was critical, this was absolutely necessary to help IT leaders to work with their business leaders and push to make the necessary infrastructure changes and incorporate Windows 2000.

But at the same time that’s almost where I would want to see a Google step in and change the game, bringing that amazing development talent to quickly turn around the apps that corporate clients are looking for, and create a simpler but secure deliver infrastructure that would lead to faster implementations. But they seem to be missing that external facing outreach to develop relationships directly with corporations
It’s my lowly opinion that while Google clearly has Microsoft in its target, it’s still a long way off from unseating it. Those strong relationships with enterprises are still a major advantage.

So the question becomes, can Google develop that expertise to work directly with enterprises in order to truly understand their needs, or will Microsoft begin to shift its development processes to more quickly respond the way Google does while utilizing its corporate relationships to shape the next generation of enterprise applications? Well, its easy to play pundit, but I certainly don't have the answer, but its a question I think will become more pronounced as Google takes bolder steps with enterprise applications, and everyone else responds accordingly.