Pattern Finder

We'll Be Talking About Microsoft 2010 and Its Alternatives at Catalyst

For those of you pondering whether to attend Burton Group's Catalyst Conference in Prague (April 19-22), you should know that we will be spending half a day on a track called: Microsoft 2010: Pros, Cons, and Alternatives.

Microsoft customers have always had to deal with forklift upgrades: "OK, let's see, the new version of Exchange is out. How does that impact the versions of Windows Server and Outlook that I'm running? Also, there's a new OS; should I refresh Office as well or leave it be?" So it's always been complicated. Now it's become extra complicated because of two new delivery options: virtualization and SaaS. So it's not just, "Should I upgrade to the new version of Exchange?" it's also, "Should I run Exchange as a virtual machine or should I run it in the cloud?" A complicated set of decisions had morphed into a three-dimensional complicated set of decisions.

Furthermore, it's not just the Microsoft products that makes it difficult to figure out. Enterprises now have more options. A number of our clients are looking at using Google Apps Premier Edition (GAPE) or Lotus Symphony. Add those options into the mix, and CIOs are now staring at a Rubik's Cube of decisions.

We're going to spend half a day walking through the alternatives. For example,

• Is it worth upgrading to Exchange 2010?
• Is it worth upgrading to Office 2010?
• Is it worth upgrading to SharePoint 2010?
• I'm looking at BPOS--how strong or weak is that, compared to running it in house?
• Can I run Exchange as a virtual machine? If so, which hypervisor should I use?
• I'm looking at alternatives to Office--which ones should I investigate and which ones should I dismiss out of hand?
• Is moving to GAPE worthwhile?

If you're like to hear the answers to those questions and get into a dialogue about your specific situation, we'd love to see you in Prague.

Google Buzz: For Most Enterprises, Much Ado About Nothing

Image via CrunchBase

Here we go again. Google announced a new product, Google Buzz, and the media is all agog about it:

• Miguel Helft and Brad Stone, "With Buzz, Google Plunges Into Social Networking," The New York Times, February 9, 2010.
• Ashley Vance, "Google Gets More Social with Buzz," Bits Blog, The New York Times, February 9, 2010.
• Jessica Vascellaro, "Google Adds 'Buzz' to Gmail," The Wall Street Journal, February 9, 2010.
• Tony Bradley, "Can Google Generate Buzz in the Enterprise?" PC World, February 9, 2010.

Google Buzz is a service that allows users to share updates, photos, and videos within the Gmail e-mail interface. As such, it's a competitor to social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

So while the media at large is blogging and writing about what this means for Facebook and Twitter, how about the bread-and-butter enterprise? What does it mean for an enterprise, trying to keep its e-mail up and make its information workers more productive? Not much.

First of all, the enterprise would need to switch to Google Apps Premier Edition (GAPE)--and very few large enterprises have done so. Some are thinking about it, but there's a big difference between thinking about it and doing it.

Second, Google Buzz isn't available on GAPE. In typical Google-speak, Google is refusing to say when it will turn up in GAPE, other than saying it will be "soon." (That certainly helps an enterprise plan [sarcasm intended]).

Third, Google has linked Buzz to largely consumer-oriented sites, such as YouTube and Flickr. Does an enterprise really want to have its employees conversing with/looking at those sites? As a general rule, I would argue no. The enterprise conversation universe should be centered within the company itself--what are other employees and and divisions doing and thinking? This isn't always true--a Marketing Communications Specialist very much wants to watch and participate in external conversations--but that's the exception, rather than the rule. Enterprises looking for a more social software orientation while keeping an enterprise focus should look at the forthcoming Microsoft Outlook Social Connector rather than Google Buzz.

However, I'm not convinced Google Buzz will be a total bust for organizations. In certain contexts, it may be quite useful. For example:

• Colleges and universities: Google Apps Education Edition has done well at some universities (being free for students has helped), and Google Buzz adds functionality for those who already use Gmail. Within universities, that's usually students, who like the web orientation of Gmail and have disdain for Outlook (it's their parents' e-mail system). Faculty and staff, however, typically stick with Outlook, and probably won't be that interested in the Google Buzz features.
• High tech startups:  A lot of high tech startups use Gmail or GAPE. It's cheap and it keeps them from having to build their own internal IT infrastructure. Furthermore, using Gmail is a style thing--it proves you're cool and cutting edge. Google Buzz adds to the functionality of Gmail, and keeps users from having to bop out to Facebook and Twitter to see what's going on.

It will be interesting to see how this all plays out. Once again, I think Google is doing a service to the market by offering up a new work paradigm, as it did with GAPE and Google Wave. However, I'm not convinced Google Buzz will ultimately win in the enterprise space.

Interview with Google CIO: He Gets It

There's an interesting article on CIO Insight entitled, "Google It: IT's Competitive Advantage." In it, reporter Brian Watson interviews Google CIO Ben Fried (formerly an infrastructure architect at Morgan Stanley) on his view of how IT should be run.

When viewed as an IT vendor, Google continues to make product strategy mistakes. But its internal IT strategy is spot on. Here are some quotes from the article followed by my comments.

At Morgan Stanley, we were very early customers of the Google search appliance. A lot of the young people there had their first exposure to productivity applications via Google Apps. That’s what they wanted. We gave them something else, which was more expensive and not what they wanted to deal with. It made me think: How do you deal with this, because there’s only so long you can give them the tools they don’t want and expect to get out of them everything they’re capable of.

He's right. The bottleneck is now no longer technology, but rather people. If you don't give tools to workers that they enjoy and can leverage, you're hampering their creativity and productivity. Ben goes on to say,

It’s hard for CIOs to accept that people feel strongly, passionately and personally about the technology tools they use to work. It’s almost insulting to people when they hear, “We know better than you how it’s best for you to work.” It’s tough for people who came from a generation where they weren’t empowered and technically capable of making choices.

This is definitely a generation thing. When I started in business, you were thrilled just to have access to a computer. If it was difficult to use, that was the way it was: you adjusted to the machine. These days, with machines a dime a dozen, the machine needs to adjust to you.

A common approach to driving costs out of customer support is rigid standardization—the thinking there is, we’re choosing only one tool for each job and, in so doing, we’ll make the support very easy and low cost. People have all kinds of great metrics for measuring this. But those CIOs end up getting painted into a corner. They take a standardization approach, which is ”all or nothing” for the organization and do things all one way; it may be a Socratic extreme, but it describes the philosophy by saying, “By not doing, we’ll knock costs out of the system.”

When talking to clients, I see this "we're going to standardize on one thing" strategy all the time. This made sense when the technology was expensive and complicated; however, now that people are much more tech savvy, some apps are web-based, and many apps don't break--demanding standardization to make IT's life easier is usually wrong. This is why a number of clients I talk to are looking to use more than one productivity suite. Microsoft Office will continue to have a place for power users; but many employees don't need--or get overwhelmed--by that much (relatively expensive) functionality. In this case, if a company says, "There will be two supported productivity suites: Microsoft Office and Openoffice.org"--while the support complexity will go up slightly, the licensing costs will decrease significantly. Ben goes on to say, 

We try to give people some measure of choice that we can support and build an ecosystem around. We support Macintosh and two versions of Windows and Linux on the desktop. We obviously like and prefer when people use Google Apps, but we also have Microsoft Office, OpenOffice and iWork in the environment. So there’s a lot of choice, and we’ve made an investment to do this.

Read the entire interview. Ben Fried gets it.

Free Webcast on My Productivity Suite Quadrant Report

As I noted in a post on the Collaboration and Content Strategies blog, Burton Group now offers two reports and a TeleBriefing on the subject of productivity suites. However, all three demand that a user have a subscription to Burton Group’s IT1 or CCS services. If you don’t have that kind of cash around but would like to watch a free webcast about my recently released Market Insight: Productivity Suites 2009 report, here it is on BrightTalk (it’s free, but requires a registration):

Online Productivity Suites News Roundup

As I was browsing through Google News this morning, I noticed a cluster of stories about online productivity suites. At Burton Group, we continue to have Dialogues with clients about alternatives to Microsoft Office, so I thought it would be useful to provide a subset of those stories (removing the rants) along with a précis or quote:

• Christopher Dawson, “Google Edu Apps vs. Microsoft Web Apps: Should I have waited?”, ZDNet, September 21, 2009. The Athol-Royalston School District in Massachusetts moved to Google Apps in August 2009: “students are using Apps quite naturally, even if some teachers and staff are a bit more reluctant.”
• Bryon Acohido, “Microsoft takes notice as more people use free Google Docs,” USA Today, September 21, 2009. A story highlighting IDC’s July QuickPoll saying 27% of respondents are already widely using Google Docs or expect to be within a year, and then quoting Microsoft’s Chris Capossela, noting that Office 2010 will have web apps. "A healthy percentage of Google Docs adoption is coming from ad hoc use," Webster says. "It's the classic case of employees making use of free consumer (online) services to get their work done, without asking permission."
• Tim Anderson, “Microsoft's Office Web Apps - a long way from here: Inside the (half-baked) tech preview,” Channel Register, September 21, 2009. A catalogue of the pluses and minuses of the Technical Preview of the Office Web Apps: “The Office Web Apps look great, present a familiar Office-like user interface, and generally render faithfully. The Silverlight-driven previews look particularly good, with smooth zooming and the ability to pop-out documents into a separate window. The main hesitations are around the limited editing features and the poor performance, which we must hope will be fixed before release.”
• Jason Brooks, “REVIEW: Office Web Apps Will Pose Strong Counterattack Against Google Apps, Zoho,” eWeek, September 21, 2009. “Microsoft recently pulled back the curtain on its Office Web Apps in the form of a limited-access technical preview, and according to eWeek Labs' tests so far, the Office Web Apps suite—while studded with its fair share of tech preview warts—signals that Microsoft's counterattack on the online office encroachment of Google, Zoho and others is off to a solid start.”
• Zack Whittaker, “Students vs. Google Apps vs. Office Web Apps,” ZDNet, September 22, 2009. A student at the University of Kent in the UK compares Google Apps with Microsoft’s Office Web Apps.
• Barry Collins, “Microsoft Office Web Apps review: first look,” PC Pro, September 22, 2009. “Although it’s clearly very early days for these online apps, the obvious fear is that Office Web Apps will only be useful for editing documents created in the desktop software, and of limited use when attempting to create documents from scratch. That may be a sensible move for a company seeking to protect its desktop software revenues, but will disappoint anyone hoping the Web Apps would provide an alternative to the regular Office upgrade cycle. Indeed, if you want to make Web Apps part of your company’s workflow - or even your own - you’ll need to upgrade to Office 2007 or 2010.”

Google: Going Around IT Again

Mike Gotta pointed me to a post over at ReadWriteWeb entitled, "Google Apps Campaign: How Not to Influence IT Experts." Google has started a billboard campaign to urge enterprises to start using Google Apps (since it's mostly been a bust in large enterprises). There's also a web site--Google Apps "Spread the Word"--that encourages employees to convince IT to move to Google Apps. Dana Oshiro, the author, notes (and I think correctly),

Meanwhile Google Apps enthusiasts are asked to influence the very people who are already more qualified to make IT-related infrastructural decisions. In other words, if you've ever seen a non-technical employee tell an IT administrator how to do his/her job, the outcome probably wasn't pretty.

Yet commenters on the post note that change in IT often came from outside IT. This is true as well. Minicomputers became popular because they offered a way for business departments to get around the slow as molasses mainframe computer group. PC LANs, in turn, became popular because they offered a way for users to get around both the mainframe and minicomputer groups.

Google's ad campaign illustrates two things. First, the company's naivete--or stupidity, depending on your point of view--at how to deal with enterprise IT. (They tried this with Google Apps Team Edition and that wasn't a huge success.)

Second, that we're going to see a replay of history here. Yes, Google Apps is currently immature--in the same way that PC LANs were immature in their early days. Yet those bugs got fixed over time, and LANs became an IT staple. We're going to see the same thing happen with SaaS-based collaboration, content, and communication. Whether Google is the company that will deliver it is debatable, but not the fact that it will happen.

Free Google Apps Comes Back: Why This Is Bad for Enterprises

Image via CrunchBase

Um, that was another Google oopsie on July 7. After all the brouhaha about Google Apps Standard Edition going away, it turns out that it isn't. The TechCrunch article has an update stating, "A Google spokesperson says, 'In experimenting with a number of different landing page layouts, the link to Standard Edition was inadvertently dropped from one of the variations. We are in the process of restoring it and you should see it soon. We have no intention of eliminating Google Apps Standard Edition, and are sorry for the confusion.'"

So take yesterday's post and turn it upside down. The Enterprise Division continues to be a hobby at Google: it's subsidized by ad revenue rather than standing on its own two feet. Bummer. I thought Google had finally seen the way to serving enterprises. Oopsie on my part. 

Free Google Apps Goes Away: Why This Is Good for Enterprises

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Google made a splash yesterday by burying the sign-up hyperlink to Google Apps Standard Edition (free) and pointing people instead to the $50/user/year version: Google Apps Premier Edition. The title of TechCrunch's article about the move ("What The Hell Happened to the Free Version of Google Apps?") hints at the general reaction. Several commenters said they felt that Google was violating its "Don't be evil" mantra with this move.

At a superficial level, this is about Google's plowing ahead with a different pricing strategy, leaving some miffed users and prospects in its wake. However, at a deeper level, this announcement signals a major organizational change at Google.

Think about it. Google has been following this dual pricing strategy for 2.5 years--it could have easily kept on a steady course. Why did it change? My guess is that upper management told the Enterprise Division that it would have to start paying its own way--it could no longer live off of ad subsidies.

In other words, this is Google saying, "Let's figure out if we have a viable business here: let's stop treating Google Apps like a lark and get serious." (A hint of the "get serious" attitude is that yesterday Google also removed the beta status from Google Apps.) If the supposition that the Enterprise Division is being told it has to stand on its own two feet is correct, that implies something else: that the Enterprise Division will be able to call its own shots. With its own money coming in, it will be able to develop the apps it needs, rather than making do with hand-me-downs (such as Google Apps) from the consumer side of the house.

In my view, the Enterprise Division has been sort of hamstrung by being a hobby at Google. (Not completely hamstrung--the Google Search Appliance, derived from Google's web search expertise, has been a big hit and a money-maker. However, Google Apps hasn't taken off with enterprises because Google hasn't made the necessary feature changes that enterprises need.) Living or dying based on paying customers will concentrate the mind of the Enterprise Division wonderfully, and that will be good for enterprises. 

The $64,000 Question: Google Docs, Acrobat.com, or Other?

A week ago, ReadWriteWeb published an interesting poll, entitled, "Poll: Which Web Office Suite Would You Pay For? Adobe or Google?" At the moment, out of 519 votes cast, 22% (114 votes) were for Adobe, 38% (199 votes) were for Google, and the greatest percentage, 40% (206 votes) were for neither. A number of commenters took the article to task for failing to point out ThinkFree and Zoho, two startups that offer productivity suites. ReadWriteWeb replied, "...we intentionally left them out so as not to dilute the vote between the two companies that are arguably industry giants as opposed to (awesome!) startups."

The problem with such open polls is you never really know the survey universe--it could include some Adobe or Google employees, hoping to tilt the results; it could include many respondents from SMBs, rather than large enterprises; and so on. Probably the more interesting part of the article is the comments, as they highlight many of the viewpoints I hear from clients. Here is a sampling:

A week ago, ReadWriteWeb published an interesting poll, entitled, "Poll: Which Web Office Suite Would You Pay For? Adobe or Google?" At the moment, out of 519 votes cast, 22% (114 votes) were for Adobe, 38% (199 votes) were for Google, and the greatest percentage, 40% (206 votes) were for neither. A number of commenters took the article to task for failing to point out ThinkFree and Zoho, two startups that offer productivity suites. ReadWriteWeb replied, "...we intentionally left them out so as not to dilute the vote between the two companies that are arguably industry giants as opposed to (awesome!) startups."

The problem with such open polls is you never really know the survey universe--it could include some Adobe or Google employees, hoping to tilt the results; it could include many respondents from SMBs, rather than large enterprises; and so on. Probably the more interesting part of the article is the comments, as they highlight many of the viewpoints I hear from clients. Here is a sampling:

Google Apps: Syncing Outlook with Gmail

Image via Wikipedia

Yesterday, Google announced Google Apps Sync for Outlook, which allows enterprises to keep the Outlook client on the front end while replacing Microsoft Exchange on the backend. From an organizational point-of-view, this allows IT to save money (usually) on e-mail administration without disrupting end-user life (since most companies use Outlook on the desktop).

Some comments, stories on the announcement:

• Google Blog: "Use Microsoft Outlook with Google Apps for email, contacts, and calendar"
• CNet: "Google plots Exchange escape with Outlook plug-in"
• TechCrunch: "Google Takes Another Swipe at Microsoft. Enterprise Apps Now Sync with Outlook."
• VentureBeat: "Google Apps syncs with Outlook--a cure for cloud computing angst"

For those paying attention to this market (or reading Burton Group reports), this announcement is not a huge surprise. Actually, the surprise is more that it took Google this long--2.3 years since announcing Google Apps--to figure out that it needed to offer this functionality. (Cisco's recognition that it needed to support Outlook as a client for SaaS e-mail was the driver behind its acquisition of PostPath last year.) In short, this software frontend/SaaS-backend architecture is required to penetrate this market. As we noted last year in the Software as a Service Enterprise E-Mail: Get Ready to Go Beyond the Grind report:

If the SaaS e-mail solution forces users to learn a new user interface, it can be a huge disruption to the majority of employees and the change will be visible to the entire corporation. However, if only the mail server is replaced and business users can continue to work as they have in the past, then a SaaS e-mail solution is effectively just a back end swap out. This makes it similar to installing a new blade server; thus, only the chief financial officer (CFO), rather than the large user population, needs to be convinced of the need for the change.

June 9: Google Apps Announcements?

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A rumor is floating around that on Tuesday, June 9, Google will host a get together in San Francisco to spotlight Google Apps. The company will make some Google Apps announcements and have some corporate customers talk about the product.

Hopefully, the company will do more than brag about the fact that GAPE recently began supporting Office 2007 documents. Given that the spec has been out for three years and some of the applicable code is open source, that recent announcement is one that underwhelms me.

Here are some that would do the opposite:

• "We've scrapped the code we inherited from the consumer business, completely rewritten the apps, and we're happy to report that Google Apps Premier Edition is now enterprise ready."
• "To highlight that Google Apps is much more of a collaboration product than a productivity suite product, we're renaming Google Apps to Google Collaboration."
• "Google Apps has been rewritten using Adobe AIR or Microsoft Silverlight so the user interface is much close to a rich client without all the overhead."
• "We have finally rewritten the underlying data model for Google Apps Premier Edition so that administration is much easier, security is stronger, and records management is built in, rather than an afterthought."

Now we just have to wait and see what Google actually says.

The Shifting Sands of Product Archetypes

It's taken me a long time to figure this out, but I recently realized that clients often view and describe products via archetypes. Rather than recounting a long laundry list of desired features, they'll say, "What I want is something like SharePoint, but with an additional capability." Initially, I classified this common way of talking as a time-saver, but I've come to realize its also a very useful market analysis tool--because the archetypes shift over time.

Let me give some examples. Way back when--40 years ago--if you wanted a really deluxe typewriter, you dreamed of an IBM Selectric. It looked cool, it had that nifty rotating ball, and made beautiful copies. When I entered college, my mind's eye was on a Selectric--but I made do with a Smith Corona. By the late 70's, people's mental image of the Selectric was replaced with a Wang Word Processor; which in turn eventually got replaced by a PC running Microsoft Word. Another example in terms of portable entertainment is the Sony Walkman; it got usurped by the Apple iPod. If your product is the archetype, you control the market conversation--your product is the baseline by which other products are described and evaluated.