Today I attended a seminar organized by Google’s division which markets their products and services for the enterprise. The seminar started with a generous, fully loaded breakfast bar with many choices. Thank you Google, it was very good.

The seminar started with an overview of Google’s products and services for the business. They are:

• Search – Google Search Appliance 

• Visualization – Google Earth, Google Maps (professional versions), SketchUp 

• Collaboration – Google Apps: Gtalk, Gmail, Docs & Spreadsheets, Calendar

Google has about 7,000 enterprise customers. They are piloting their Google Apps with big brads such as GE, Proctor & Gamble, L’Oreal, and more.

The main take away from this was that the traditional enterprise technology is lagging behind the consumer technology. Good examples of such consumer technologies are not only MySpace, YouTube, Flickr and such, but also iPods, Tivo, DVR, XBOX, and so on.  In the past 5-7 years the user friendly consumer technology has flourished. They are multiplying in warp speed while enterprise technology has been climbing at much slower rate. Google’s goal is to bring consumer technology to business.

Google has the following lessons for us to learn:

1. Fast is better than slow. IT projects must be done in more iterative fashion and not a big bang. Their advise is to launch and improve it.

2. Simple (not simplistic) is better than complex.

3. Assume Chaos and deal with it. There is much more unstructured data (docs, pdfs, images, audio, video, web pages) now than ever before.

I think their most shocking point was that hierarchies are dead, categorization is not scalable. Google gave as an example of the human edited directory dmoz.org. Dmoz.org has approximately 4 million web sites categories by 74,000 editors. Google indexed and serves billions of pages.

Google’s advice:

• don’t throw anything away

• publish and share

• stop categorizing and using hierarchy

• embrace search as navigation

They made a nice pitch for their suite of applications for the enterprise. Google Apps are available from your own domain. They are hosted by Google on their data centers, beefed up with security, backup, redundancy etc… Google Apps are accessible via the web from any internet connection.

Google Apps include:

• GMail

• Calendar

• GTalk

• Docs and spreadsheets

• Page creator

They also took us on a drive of their real-time Google intranet called Moma showing off their Google Apps in action. They are made to “eat their own dog food”. It was impressive.

Google poses real threat to the current monopolist in the space – Microsoft.

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