The Enterprise Gets Googled

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In This Edition...
The Enterprise Gets Googled
If Google has its way, you’re going to have to get used to an IT environment with no applications to roll out.
Preparing for IT’s New Age
The service-fulfillment model for IT is dying. A new philosophy of innovation and productivity is being born. Here’s what CIOs need to know to stay on top of the curve.
The EDI Transition
Smart companies are taking their transition from EDI to the Internet slowly—to keep IT costs down and let suppliers’ and customers’ investments in technology catch up.
SOA’s True Challenge
To gain the business-IT alignment promised by service-oriented architecture, CIOs have to focus on process and architecture—not just technology.
ESPN Fast Breaks Into the Future
ESPN‘s Tech VP Chuck Pagano relies on communication, collaboration and a one-on-one leadership style.
The Worst Job in IT
Change is unstoppable and CIOs are no exception, but they risk losing their staff unless they communicate better.
How to Find Your Competitive Advantage
If a product or process allows you to differentiate from your competitors, it’s ‘core.‘ For Domino’s Pizza, delivery is core.
A Benchmark for the Strategic CIO
The CIO Executive Council has developed a benchmark to define and measure the performance of the CIO role‘s strategic aspects.
MAY 1, 2006 |CIO MAGAZINE
ENTERPRISE IT
The Enterprise Gets Googled
Can you imagine an IT environment without applications to roll out? You’re going to have to if Google’s plan to conquer the enterprise works.
BY BEN WORTHEN
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You’ve Been Googled
Your company won’t run on the Web tomorrow, but now is a good time to prepare for the day it will.
Read More
Google’s Progeny
Google may not be the company that ultimately brings Web computing to the enterprise. It could be one of these companies.
Read More
On Feb. 14, 2006, many Google e-mail users received an unexpected Valentine‘s Day present. When they logged in to their accounts, there it was: instant messaging, fully integrated with their e-mail system. Gmail users could now chat in the same browser window as their inbox. Just as with e-mail, the system would save a transcript of every chat and, better yet, the text of archived transcripts would be searchable. There was nothing to download, nothing to install.
It was technology magic.
This was another overnight success for Google, the company most everybody loves (with the exception of a few countries, some municipal governments, and a host of proto-competitors such as Microsoft, IBM and Yahoo). Over the past few years, Google has released a series of Web-based applications that have raised the bar for its competitors, just as its search engine did when it burst onto the scene at the end of 1999. When Gmail debuted on April 1, 2004, for example, it gave users a gigabyte of storage—10 times as much as Yahoo and Microsoft‘s free e-mail services.
Google releases its products with little fanfare, labeling them beta versions and leaving them that way for years. Yet its desktop search, map, e-mail and other services are among the world‘s best and most popular applications. And whether you know it or not, your employees are probably using them.
But Google is not just a search company, or an applications company. A company that can scan billions of webpages for a handful of words in less than a second (a search for "CIO magazine" returned almost 28 million results, prioritized by relevance, in 0.14 seconds) deserves to be acknowledged for what it really is: a supercomputer.
"What Google recognized was that if they built their own system using cheap, off-the-shelf PCs and ran their own operating system"—the Google File System, a highly customized version of Linux—"they could afford limitless expansion," says Chris Sherman, executive editor of Searchenginewatch.com. In order to build the best search engine possible, Google connected thousands, then tens of thousands, of servers. And at some point that infrastructure and the possibilities it afforded became the company‘s primary focus. What followed was a series of services that took advantage of Google‘s ability to process transactions at a speed and scale never before achieved. And these Web-based services don‘t require users to download a thing. Google provides the computing power. All you need is a browser.
"What Google has that‘s extraordinary is not search but the highly optimized computing platform," says Sue Feldman, VP of content technologies research at IDC (a sister company to CIO‘s publisher). That platform has Google poised to lead the Web computing revolution that everyone in the IT industry has been talking about since the 1990s.
Google‘s platform, along with the others bound to follow in its wake, will, over time, move computing to the Web and away from the desktop. As this happens, IT will get better—applications will be easier, faster and cheaper to use—much as it did when it moved off the mainframe 20 years ago. "We‘re still far away from a holistic Web computing solution," says Brian Shield, CIO of The Weather Channel. "But the pieces are not that far away. We‘re not far from fostering greater productivity with Google‘s name on it."
The move to online computing will change the relationship between CIOs and users. Just as accessing applications over the Web will give CIOs more flexibility to find the best fit for their businesses, their employees will enjoy that same flexibility in finding the applications that are best for them. In the Google-future, IT will be more scalable, agile and cost-effective. But it will also be less controllable by CIOs. This will require CIOs to adopt a new mind-set for how they manage the use of IT in their company. Those who succeed will be free to focus on driving innovation; those who fail will be fighting a battle they‘re destined to lose.
"CIOs need to understand that it is a whole new world," says Feldman.
Inside the Googleplex
Web computing could make a CIO‘s life much, much easier. Applications will be hosted by third parties that can support an almost unlimited number of users and store almost unlimited amounts of data. CIOs will no longer have to maintain large databases or expensive desktop software. And because these applications live on the Web, your employees will be able to access them with any device that supports a browser.
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Readers Viewpoint
Googleaid
Posted: MAY 03, 2006 08:06:24 AM
Ben, you’ve been given and swallowed WAY too much Googleaid...;-)
Robert Maxwell’s comments are pretty much on-target regarding corporate risk-averse behavior but add to them that nothing Google can do in a mass market environment can have unique competitive advantage to an individual company by definition.
As for Win32 apps, well, they’ll all be Win64 soon enough and running on multi-core, multi-proc hardware that will deliver more than enough computing horsepower that having to use Google’s virtual supercomputer platform will be neither necessary nor advisable.
Richard Warren
VP and Enterprise Solutions Architect
MicroLink LLC
Where are the Change Agents
Posted: MAY 03, 2006 05:26:34 AM
This has been one of the most interresting articles I have read in quite some time. Firstly - People are not assets to a company, quite frankly because the company does not own the people. Maybe the applications in a coorporation could have the same benefit.
Do you own the MS application that you purchased, or do you only own the the license to operate the application??
Break this down any way you want, but Google has brought us back to an revolutionary era, just like MS did back in the mainframe days. Would you work in that era again??
And it will make my TCO look very peachy!!
Nick van der Walt
Regional IT Manager
CBI
Google’s advantage is not forever
Posted: MAY 02, 2006 12:45:09 AM
Google knows that applications will not all be web-based. Their most interesting products, beyond search, involve win32 applications, which just happen to update intelligently over the Internet. They know the benefits of a client-side presence, and caught on to the transparent update more quickly than others.
Microsoft will be making ever greater strides in this area, as no one knows the win32 platform better than they do.
Keep in mind, business computing is much more risk averse than consumer computing, and, while Google has created reliable products, they will face greater barriers to adoption at the Enterprise level where they will not have a carte blanche to introduce functionality and changes.
Robert Maxwell
Director
US Technology Resources
RE: Browser support
Posted: MAY 01, 2006 03:18:37 PM
"Gmail does not support all popular browsers, and they want to plant an ActiveX control. Why? I find this disturbing."
Define popular.
They are covering 90+% of internet users I’m guessing.
Nothing new this has been around
Posted: APR 29, 2006 10:09:47 PM
My first experience with hosted applications was in 1993. When computing power was hard to find, most universities host the applications on the central servers. Applications which were needed were downloaded on to the PC.
With the web many companies tried to reinvent this concept with different names. If you want a list of companies, Oracle, IBM, Salesforce.com and SAP. What google is doing is nothing new. This has been available since 1999. Many other companies offer hosted applications as well, yet this concept has failed.
Hosted application outsourcing works for small businesses, which lack the fund to have in house IT departments and resources. When it comes to large enterprise computing, CIOs have to deal with more than just rolling out a new version of the applications. CIOs have to deal with the second most valuable asset of the company. First being employees and second being data. Most large enterprises have billions of dollars of data, which in the wrong hands can cripple the companies competitive advantage. This security vulnerablitity has hampered the hosted application outsourcing market and will continue to do so even if companies like Google and yahoo come with a new name to an age old framework.
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