From InformationWeek:

Google partner LTech has already build an application called SharePoint Move for Google Apps using the API to help liberate data, as Google might put it, from SharePoint.

Sharepoint Move is based on the Google Sites APIs.  These types of APIs are what makes the cloud viable.  The best cloud computing platforms have open, easy-to-understand, standards based interfaces for developers, customers, and partners to build upon.

The idea behind Sharepoint move is to help organizations smoothly transition their users to Google Apps.  Many companies have invested a significant amount of time and training on systems like Sharepoint.   Tools that help to ease that transition have value in the cloud product ecosystem today.  We’ll be marketing more tools like this for the Google Apps platform (and other platforms) in the coming months.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I lived through the dotcom bust – I was a fresh faced developer just starting to get my stride.   I was in the office with too many Aeron chairs in a hip loft with lots of iMac’s and cable lighting.  After the parties ended, when the bottom fell out, there was not much left to do but look around and say “What happened?”  We all moved on, some of us started companies, some went to work for the Web 2.0 giants, some went to the Fortune 500.   For anyone who experienced those wacky days, especially in New York City, the movie August is a trip down memory lane.

Set in the waning days of the dotcom era pre-9/11, August captures glimpses of the reality and promise of that time.  The writer uses some awkward terms (“Click-and mortar”) and the acting and story aren’t particulary interesting.  But the essence of the day is there  – the office set is spot on, as is the CNBC-like interview in the opening scene.  Theres talk of Bezos, option lockups, and Gulfstreams.

Beyond the nostalgia, some of the writing touched a nerve with me as I thought about all of the good ideas (and bad ones) that didn’t quite have the chance to make it because of costs, bandwidth, and lack of existing services.  August was like that glowing orange copy of WIRED Magazine from 1999 that sat on my desk too long – reminding me of how both exciting and futile those days were.   How could we build the next great medium when we had to build for downlevel browsers and 56k dialup?  What can you do when ideas take millions of dollars of hardware and software just to get going?   With the emergence of the Cloud -  the hope and hype of the dotcom days may actually be realized.

The Cloud is pure “e”

The Cloud is freedom. It is unfiltered, immediate, and cheap innovation power.  It’s not just content delivery, storage, CPUs, or memory.   It is boundless rendering farms. It’s supercomputer simulation and modeling for the masses.  It’s world-class software, platforms, and infrastructure to build whatever you want without having to worry about what it might cost you if it doesn’t work out.  Thomas Edison would have been a fan.

In academia, imagine what this access will mean to the next generation of students and professors?  The same kids who are putting up EC2 clusters for C.S. class are going to be in the next doctoral programs at Stanford, Berkeley, MIT.  They’ll be working for cloud services and product firms building the next generation of Internet technology.   The physical sciences and social sciences will also benefit from the ability to conduct limitless experiments at extremely low costs.

The government it using it on sites like Whitehouse.gov; and in probably other places that aren’t so public.

For those of us in the private sector we are presented with a unique opportunity to offer new products and services that would be unimaginable just a few years ago because of both costs and technical capabilties.

The economy is accelerating the adoption cycle

The slowing economy is forcing companies to take a look at the Cloud.  It was going to take many more years for the adoption of industrial strength software, platform, and infrastructure in a decent economy.   Without pressure to cut costs, there was little incentive for IT managers to take risk.

But the time has come.  Saving money is more important than sacred cows like email and infrastructure.   I’ve been in a dozen meetings in the past 45 days with CIO’s, CEO’s, and other decision makers at large firms.  They all feel it coming.  The smart money is going to the Cloud – in one form or another.  Who wants to be the CIO or direct report who recommends spending more money on traditional IT without evaluating the cloud?  How many  IT careers are in the making because of shrewd decisions and well executed plans that result in millions of dollars in cost savings?

What Fortune 500 CIO would have said this in 2007?

“Let’s put all of our corporate email and sales and customer data on some network that is located somewhere we don’t know, on hardware we’ve never seen.  We’ll pay them a modest yearly fee, only for the employees actually using it, and we don’t have to spend too much more worrying about it after we make the switch.  By the way, it only takes a few days or weeks to setup, even for tens of thousands of users.  And it works from a $250 netbook, a Blackberry, or a laptop that we never have to install software on.”

Not one.  They couldn’t.  This stuff didn’t exist the way it does now.

But they are saying it now – maybe in not those exact words, but with their wallets. They are saying it at small and large companies alike. The CFO is in charge now and she wants to lower costs and increase productivity.

The enterprise is adopting the Cloud. With software like Google Apps and Salesforce, platforms like AppEnine and Force.com, and infrastructure from Amazon.  There are dozens more promising products and services coming online everyday.

This isn’t going to be easy, but neither is golf or surfing.  There is a community of people working hard to find opportunities and develop this industry despite the slow overall economy.   As a bonus, much of the innovation is happening here in the United States, for as old industries die we need to create new ones for our children and future generations.  The pure “e” of the Cloud will be the catalyst for the next IT revolution.

PS -  Thanks to my friend Eric from Klotnet for lending me the August DVD.

It’s easy for startups and small firms to take advantage of the menu of cloud computing services out there, but how does an IT manager at a mid-size or large enterprise get in the game?  There is a ton of hype out there about cloud computing – and nervous IT managers don’t want to risk their reputation or their organizations cash fiddling with systems that can be argued as "unproven." 

While cloud computing won’t solve all your woes, or cut your IT budget to zero, it does offer a nice way to trim the fat and reduce overhead, including energy footprint and physical costs (space, hardware, ping pipe and power, etc).   All this while remaining scalable and flexible; options that heretofore went out the window when the budget axe came through.

But as the saying goes, "No one’s been fired for buying IBM," so let’s look at some low-risk, high-return entry points into the cloud for today’s IT manager.  I’ll outline them below and follow up with more detailed posts later.

1. Communication and Collaboration Services:  Let’s lump in email (Google Apps), phone (outsourced Voip), and project management utilties here.  There is obvious return (no hardware or maintenance costs, increased functionality, spam protection, scalability, etc) – but how can a larger firm use this in a safe, low risk way?  Exploring a progressive migration to these types of services, targeting the temporary and flexible portion of your workforce is a good start.  More on this to come.
2. Lab infrastructure: Can you think of lab related functions in your organization that require physical infrastructure and can be moved to cloud based hosting like Amazon EC2?  This sort of infrastructure is small in comparison to your mainline production and data processing systems, but I am sure occupies at least a few percentage points of your overall IT spend.   By labs, I mean things like:
   • development servers
   • QA and test servers
   • R&D and skunkworks environments
   • Training environments
3. Time-sensitive infrastructure: How much of your datacenter spend is dedicated to overnight reconciliations, true-ups, clearing, and processing? A unique advantage of utility oriented cloud computing solutions (like Amazon EC2), is that they can be turned on and off at will.  Imagine eliminating racks of servers that performed time-based functions and only paying for the time they are in service. I’ll explore the security implications of this later because this is a no-brainer if you can work that side of it out.
4. Web infrastructure: Intranets. Extranets. Public facing websites.  Get them out of your datacenter. If they are already out, get them out of Managed Services (or at least traditional managed services).  With the advent of Microsoft Windows Server 2003 support on Amazon EC2, and SQL Server support, only the most intensive web applications will continue to absolutely need to be in a physical managed environment. 

This is an evolving list, if you have any suggestions or thoughts, please comment! I’ll continue this thread of thought as the cloud computing space quickly progresses.

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A open, flexible Facebook-style API for Apps would be awesome.  Imagine the community building the next generation office platform.

Right now, developers outside of Google can write Gadgets that live on the outside layout areas of GMail. Google developers have done some interesting things with Labs – I use the easy to find "Mark as Read" button / gadget.  However, if trusted development teams in the community, and developers at companies adopting Google Apps, had complete access to everything – including the interface, Apps would meet the challenge set forth to it by Microsoft Office (and its powerful friend, VBA).  A fully programmable cloud-based office suite.

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Gmail supports easier access to contacts when composing a message

Google is also improving their Postini offerings with some very robust security features. http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/security/web.html

This is great news for Google Apps Premier customers, especially large companies and educational institutions who need this sort of peace of mind and protection on their network.

Holla back if you are using Google Apps…

Back in May, Microsoft began offering hosted Exchange on college campuses through its Live@edu service — a move some saw as a direct response to Google’s success in the higher education market. Yahoo is also pushing to entrench its Zimbra email and collaboration desktop in higher ed. It’s part of an overall trend toward hosted email services on college campuses, Laczynski said.

“We’re seeing interest in this space in general and specifically with Google Apps,” he said. “There’s a lot of excitement. … These are students that are used to Gmail. They love Google. They’re used to hosted services. They’re not corporate email users.”

I spoke with Colin Steele, from TechTarget, earlier this week  regarding the opportunities for solution providers working with Google Apps in the Education space.   It is truly an exciting time to be involved in a transitional technology wave.  Hosted and cloud-based services are the way things are going, and Google Apps is a great example of a real world case.  We’ve seen so much great interest from colleges, universities, and school districts around the country.

Google has been rocking lately with updates to Google Apps.  Every week there seems to be more news coming out of Mountain View.  The latest news, hot of the press from Google’s Official Blog, is more evidence that this technology might just turn out to be as disruptive to Microsoft as anything else happening right now:

Now I can create, edit, publish, and fly on an airplane without loading up any Microsoft programs.

First of all, there is a drum beating in the media for an epic battle between Mister Softie and Google. The article this weekend in the New York Times ( Google Gets Ready to Rumble ) has been the subject of much discussion on the Interwebs.

From the article:

[...] Google introduced a package of online software offerings, called Google Apps, that includes e-mail, instant messaging, calendars, word processing and spreadsheets. They are simpler versions of the pricey programs that make up Microsoft’s lucrative Office business, and Google is offering them free to consumers.

Second, we work with Google Apps everyday – our firm, LTech Consulting, is a Google Enterprise Partner. The pace that we have seen requests for migrations from Exchange to Google Apps has accellerated to the point that we are now opening new offices, hiring more people, and otherwise busier than we’ve been in a long time. Our experience is just one small slice – mere anecdotal evidence that Google is truly disrupting Microsoft. We also work with Microsoft tools like Sharepoint and the Office suite. For every 10 projects that we see that are Apps related, we see 1 Microsoft Office specific project. Does that reflect the reality of the entire marketplace? No. But it has to mean something.

Third, Google is not merely attacking Microsoft with Apps. It is attacking IE with its support of Firefox. It is attacking the server platform with its nascent, yet powerful, GData APIs. Along with Amazon, APIs and Web Services are become the foundation of the next-web – not Web 3.0, but a whole other beast altogether. And on the platform front, Apple is helping to erode market share of Windows.

But what does it all mean? In what way will Microsoft be disrupted other than a slowdown in revenue growth over a long period of time? What is the answer for Microsoft? Well, I have a sweet spot in my heart for Gates & Co. and I want to see them succeed. I owe the formative years of my career to the powerful, easy to use, and well-supported development environment of Visual Studio. Here is what I think (hope) will happen.
Microsoft will split into 5 companies that can openly work with or compete with one another.

If Billy G is still involved, it might look like this:

Microsoft will organize itself into 5 openly competitive business units.

Here is how it might look:

1. OS Company: Sells operating systems for devices, workstations, home computers, and servers
2. Development Tools Company: Sells IDE’s, development tools, development platforms. .NET becomes truly multi-OS compatible (absorbs Mono project)
3. Productivity and Collaboration Tools Company: Office, web office, SharePoint, etc. Develops full featured collaboration tools for any platform, including Web.
4. Web Services Company: MSN, Search, Live, etc. Starts incubating new ideas again (see Expedia)
5. Gaming Company: Let’s face it – save for XBox, Microsoft really hasn’t had any hits lately. The next generation of XBox services get decoupled from the mothership and continue to provide innovative online play and adult-oriented gaming.

What do you think?

This is big news for Google Apps. Compliance and archiving are huge concerns for corporate customers. Just ask Intel or Merrill Lynch. Full-blown compliance systems are typically very expensive and come with liability concerns that make choosing a vendor very important. With Google in the game now, it makes the decision to move to a hosted collaboration platform like Google Apps much easier.

Some key features:

Policy management: lets administrators implement rules for how
messages are handled based on the sender, recipient, attachments or
content of the message.

Message recovery: allows you to search for mail across your whole
domain and recover deleted emails on a 90-day rolling basis, adding
peace of mind that important information is safe with Google Apps,
even in the case of accidental deletion by your users.

A full description can be seen here:

http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/admins/new.html#admin

the ‘net seems to be buzzing about this a bit:

Information Week

dbTechno

ArsTechnica