"The Google Push: A New Human Interface for the Enterprise?
Wednesday, April 19, 2006 Jim Murphy
In collaboration with enterprise software partners, Google unveiled a series of initiatives that could change the (inter)face of enterprise computing as we know it. It’s not just for searching anymore: Google could become the one place business users go to access and retrieve important business data. The news Under investor pressure to diversify its revenue sources, Google has renewed its efforts in the enterprise. The push may seem practical and tactical from the financial perspective, but there are enormous implications for the way enterprise users access critical data, inside and outside of the enterprise, and services from a widening array of providers. Announcements include enterprise product updates, enhancements, and partnerships with established enterprise vendors. Demonstrating enterprise potential The best way to explain it is through the end-user experience, which is exactly what Google recognizes as its foothold and source of strength—enterprise and otherwise. It’s a simple, inelegant, but mind-altering experience. Imagine this. You’re a salesperson at work just doing your job. You need to access a range of information, some of it external, some of it bound up in enterprise systems, and some of it on file servers strewn around your organization. Instead of logging into and accessing seven different systems to retrieve the information, you access one: www.google.com. You click “Include Secure Content,” listed right there alongside “images,” “groups,” “news,” etc., right above your Google search box. You type in a prospect’s name. Google’s “One Box for Enterprise” interface kicks in to provide you with just the information you need, derived from your company’s CRM system, including detailed contact information and relevant communication records. You didn’t even have to spell the name correctly. You type in “Sales in Northeast.” Google brings back a real-time sales figures graphic. You bring it right into the browser interface rather than being forced to click on a link to pull up the report. It’s generated by the Cognos business intelligence (BI) system. You didn’t have to know the exact name of the report. You could have just typed in “North East Sales” and retrieved the same authoritative and accurate result. You type in a purchase order number. Google recognizes the number as such and retrieves the appropriate records in your Oracle ERP system, also finding and retrieving an imaged document from a file server and a contact name from an Outlook contact list. You type in “revenue by age” (mistyping it). Google retrieves a real-time chart generated by your SAS analytics platform. You may not perform processes there just yet, but you go to Google for all the information you need to make business decisions and perform your job with complete awareness of what’s going on around you. Google is the human access point for all of your critical information, inside and outside the firewall, structured and unstructured. Google doesn’t itself create anything new. It just brings information and services to the business user, extending its usefulness. Google for the enterprise: not simply search In this scenario, Google isn’t just for searchers anymore. It increasingly becomes the human interface for enterprise information. Rather than a last resort when you can’t navigate to what you’re looking for, it’s the starting point for information access and retrieval. Google doesn’t explicitly seek to be treated as a technology platform—at least in the sense of an extension of the enterprise architecture—accessible only to enterprise developers. Rather, Google recognizes the importance of the end-user point of view, both as the source of its own success in the consumer market and the obstacle to success of many enterprise systems. As Google rightly states, business users are consumers too. And they regard Google as simple, fast, and familiar. Partnerships
The scenario described above could never be handled by Google on its own. Complementary partners, in the form of software vendors and systems integrators (earlier, Google inked partnerships with BearingPoint and Avenue A | Razorfish, in addition to the software partners mentioned throughout) will be essential in helping companies make such visions a reality. Google has rightly acknowledged that partnerships with established enterprises vendors will go a long way in lending it enterprise credibility and trust. This means reassuring customers that their security, privacy, and compliance concerns can be addressed, as well as assuaging potential conflicts of interest of using a vendor whose revenue derives predominantly from advertising. Certainly, Google has the funds to devote to an enterprise push in terms of product refinements and security accommodations, but the sponsorship of established enterprise partners will allay much of the trepidation on the part of enterprise customers and prospects. Google might once have been characterized as aloof and reticent in terms of enterprise partnerships in the past, but that’s changing. With eager software vendors clamoring for attention, Google has had the luxury to choose the best fits—the complements that meet common demands. Clearly, BI is one such area. Cognos and SAS have both developed demonstrable integrations with Google, as mentioned above. We’ve long tracked the cross demands for BI and search integration (see the AMR Research Alert article “BI-Search Convergence: The View From the Business Intelligence Side”). The Google news makes such ideas more feasible for customers. Another is CRM. Many CRM systems have failed, or at least struggled severely, for lack of accessibility and usability for a wide range of workers. With the potential to act as the one place to get all this information and the familiarity of Google in the consumer market, one place to go could be part of the answer. Partners include software-as-a-service (SaaS) vendors NetSuite and salesforce.com, with some notable scenarios from Oracle also coming into play. Other partners include Cisco, which will provide a way to tie its MeetingPlace conferencing system into the Google OneBox interface. Partners will build and offer connectors that allow access to information stored in their systems, as well as provide business logic that goes some way toward interpreting user queries and determining relevancy. Product updates and enhancements Product updates are largely to better support the scenarios above. The new version of the Google Search Appliance extends the reach of access into various structured and unstructured data sources, integrates more cohesively with enterprise security investments, improves performance by up to two times, and supports additional linguistic features. Considering competitors Google is not the first company to conceive of any of these ideas, but it just may be the first with the firepower in the form of funding, market attention, and especially brand, to really make it happen. More established enterprise search companies, like Autonomy, FAST, and more recently Endeca, have all promoted their ability to serve as information access platforms for the enterprise. They have also perceived and acted upon the notion that search technology can complement and extend BI systems. All have gone through considerable effort to establish a critical mass of software and services partners. Then there’s IBM, which is attempting to establish a standard for indexing enterprise data, called UIMA (see the AMR Research Alert article “IBM Takes a Bite Out of Search”), and garner support from many of the same vendors with which Google is partnering—Cognos and SAS among them. Certainly, this effort could lead to a stratification of the search market, with IBM acting as an information integration mechanism on the back end while Google provides the interface. IBM will be well positioned to complement Google with an ability to use Information Integrator to build and maintain back-end connection and synchronization between various data sources. Google would still be the interface. Nevertheless, customers, many of whom want to standardize on a single platform for navigation, search, and retrieval (71% according to our 2006 Knowledge Management Spending Study) may have difficulty seeing them as anything but competitors. And there will inevitably be competition outside of search as we know it today. For instance, Google’s enterprise push could seriously disrupt the content management, collaboration, and portal markets. And with Microsoft poised to introduce radically new and resource-intensive operating systems and office suites, Google, not Linux or IBM, may be setting itself up as the new alternative.
Copyright © 2005 AMR Research, Inc.
..."
|
You need to upgrade your Flash Player , or try to enable javascript in order see this document properly.
|
|
Comments
