Will Google Wave reshape enterprise IT?
Google blew the minds of developers with the introduction of its innovative Google Wave, a new approach to real-time content collaboration, but its odds of breezing into enterprise computing anytime soon remain remote.
Within enterprise IT departments, starved for compelling ways to collaborate on application development, however, Google Wave may find a ready audience.
Enterprise computing remains in the Stone Age, by modern standards, a topic nicely addressed by the Financial Times recently. While the consumer Internet offers diverse ways to connect (via Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, and other services), the enterprise remains somewhat buttoned-down, relegated to Microsoft Exchange and the occasional fling with IBM's Lotus.
Pardon me while I stifle a yawn.
This isn't necessarily Microsoft's or IBM's fault, of course. Both offer other products that push the envelope on enterprise computing. But it's hard for enterprises to easily digest rapid-fire innovation, and it's not exactly easy for software vendors to recoup investments in groundbreaking innovations, either, as RedMonk's Stephen O'Grady noted in his review of Google Wave:
We don't see a lot of dramatic leaps forward in software, I'd argue, both because it's exceedingly difficult to develop and launch revolutionary products, and because the economics act against it.
It's difficult, of course, to produce them: how many vendors can afford the indulgence of turning high-quality resources loose on a multiyear project with no clear revenue plan in place? But it can be even more difficult to market (or sell such revolutionary products) because, well, they're not what people are used to, and they take some explaining.
So, given that Google Wave may have moved much further than most enterprises are able to willing to accept, at least for now, what good is it?
Equitas IT Solutions' Ryan Cartwright suggests an answer. He indicates that Wave offers "the chance to...make a big improvement in the way we develop free software."
He's absolutely right, but why stop there?
Most of the world's software is not written by open-source software developers, nor is it written by Microsoft or other traditional software vendors. It's written by enterprises for internal use. As such, if Google Wave has the potential to facilitate software development by facilitating real-time collaboration on code--and it does--then why not unleash its potential within enterprise application development?
Google Wave may well crash on the shore of enterprise adoption, but I suspect that it may well roll into the enterprise, anyway, as a code collaboration tool deployed by enterprise IT for its own use. Eventually, that "personal" consumption should trickle out to business users clamoring for their enterprise-computing experience to catch up with their consumer-computing world.
This could be Google's game to lose.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
For me, Wave is a very intriguing product, but distinctly identifying the business value, especially in environments that already have other collaboration tools in place will be quite challenging.
The *vast* majority of corporate workers *never* work outside their corporate boundaries and the majority of collaboration tools work easily across those boundaries. I email, IM, videoconference, and share documents with people around the world with hardly a hitch and I don't need a cloud or a wave to accomplish it.
I agree that Wave has some interesting potential, but it will be up to Google to clearly build out the tool (like calendaring) to bring that potential into focus.
Meanwhile, the commercial software companies are developing products that lie on the desktop and in the cloud and offer a seemless option for both worlds. Outlook Web offers the same interface as Outlook on the desktop making it easy for users to transition to a web based application front end. To be fare, look no further than the next version of Office.
You could cluster Exchange 2003 with 2 servers, 2007 requires 3 or 4. Sharepoint requires domain accounts for all users -- forget sharing Intranet and Extranet infrastructures. Don't get me started on administrative costs and the costs and difficulties of backups.
Google Wave, operating in a model similar to Google Apps within corporate domains, offers a new platform for communication and collaboration features and availability. Expect enterprises, many of which are already moving to Google Apps Premier Edition, to have the ability to activate and migrate users to these new features when they ready.
Comparable capabilities at 25-50% of the in-house cost? Enhanced capabilities for comparable or lower costs? Business have multiple incentives to move.
Regards,
Allen
www.horizoninfoservices.com
Connecting a thin-client or browser app to a remote-server only service available only over the internet is cloud based.
Multiple communicating servers or a single server hosting a service which can be remotely or locally available and connected to other servers or isolated is not. It's positively old school.
Some people really need to get the idea of understanding that which they criticise.
Senior management (the pointy-haired people) needs to be convinced that this new technology is useful. Uber-connected technophiles do not drive technology adoption in enterprises. Heck, our IT department is skipping Windows Vista, probably won't install Windows 7 until six months after the release date, so maybe a year from now, Windows 7 will be rolled out to the first users who will be the more tech savvy folks who can report problems before a large-scale rollout to the rest of the company.
Since Google Wave isn't even a product, it will be years before this stuff emerges in the corporate radar. For now, it's just a little playtoy.
Frankly, I think a lot of developers would simply respond with, "Thanks, let's talk in a few years. I'm busy working on my iPhone game. I'm building the next Koi Pond."
Good thing you aren't in charge of IT security.
It is bad enough, and extremely expensive for businesses to allow MS into their networks.
If you scratch the surface of Wave, what's most interesting to us is that underneath it is a protocol (with an 'example server' to be open sourced by Google). That protocol is an extension of the IETF standard XMPP (Jabber) protocol that is supported by major platform vendors such as Sun, Oracle, IBM, Cisco (who now owns the commercial company "Jabber Inc"). By choosing to go this route, Google has made it easy for these companies to upgrade their existing XMPP offerings to become Wave servers.
Google very well may be playing 'me too' with Wave, although I would agree with Matt that Sharepoint is more of a content management system whereas Wave - at a technology level - is something quite different (in fact, Ray Ozzie over at Microsoft equates Wave with Live Mesh, not Sharepoint). But in the end, so what if its 'me too'? In its own way, Google Maps (done by the same 3 people, BTW - two brothers and a product manager lady) was 'me too' too, but it raised the bar as to what the end customer expected from a maps web site. We believe that Wave will do the same for collaboration / content management tools... and "staid old" business apps as well (which is our bread and butter).
The point here is that Wave *is not* a 'Google product'. Wave is a protocol that, like the email protocols of old, can be added to anyone's server (nothing to stop Microsoft from adding it to Exchange 2010 or whatever). What has been demonstrated by the creators at Google is *one example* of what is possible when you have such a protocol. There are those of us out here thinking of all sorts of things (including 'old style, back office, business apps') that can be done with this underlying technology.
I would agree that its going to be a few years before this all firms up, no question. The point is that, like other open protocols and open platforms, it will move inexorably forward, leveraging the profit motive and incentives of all sorts of players, not just one.
To sum up, Wave is *not* interesting because of what Google is going to do with it... Wave is interesting because of what *you're* going to do with it (just like most things that are open).
Cheers,
- Bill
Just the fact that it was designed by the same guy that did Google Maps should give you a hint.
- by malbertpps June 20, 2009 3:33 PM PDT
- I agree with the sentiment that Google Wave is the beginning of web 3.0. Isn't enterprise barely shuffling into web 2.0 territory now? I have read many articles about Wave but I do not see anyone pointing out one of it's major impediments. That would be Internet Explorer. Now this is not a knock on Microsoft per say but the fact of the matter is that IE 8 does not support html 5 and is currently the only browser that cannot support Google Wave. IE has a frighteningly high user rate in the enterprise world and until they move onto a real browser they are going to be behind the times regardless of what products come out. I have written my first impressions of google wave on my site if interested. http://pressplaysolutions.com
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