Google: More Insight into Its Cloud Play
July 22, 2008
The summer of transparency continues. The lucky beneficiary of the Google summer of openness is Doug Henschen, the capable journalist at Intelligent Enterprise. Mr. Henchen does a good job of capturing the thoughts of Rishi Chandra. If you are a Google watcher, you will want to read the full text of this interview here.
Several points stuck in my addled goose brain after reading this interview. May I share these with you? Then I will offer a handful of observation from the hills of rural Kentucky. Now the main points for me:
- The Salesforce.com tie up with Google “is at the application layer.” The idea is that Salesforce.com can tap Google and–the interesting bit–Google can tap into Salesforce.com. Google also pats Salesforce.com on the head. Mr. Chandra says, “”…They helped us improve those APIs so they [Salesforce.com] can do a lot more than third parties could do previously.”
- App Engine is designed or engineered to “bulld onto Google infrastruture and gain the same capabilities and scalability.”
- Mr. Chndra notes, “We built our infrastructure os it’s particularly tuned for Web applications.”
- Mr. Chandra reveals, “Our appraoch will follow the model … to go from consumers to the enterprise”
I find these points significant because Google transparency talks “run a game plan.” Google is not the slap dash group of beer drinking math club members that some in the media see when scrutinizing Google. My research suggests that Google is caclulating. In fact, the subtitle of my 2007 study is “the Calculating Predator.”
Let me offer some observations about these four points. I will reference some of the research data in my Google Version 2.0, so if you want the nitty gritty, you will need to track down that 250 page, dull as dishwater report here.
Observations from the Addled Goose
First, Salesforce.com wants to do a lot more than date Google, according to my research. Google has technology that can cure the scaling and performance issues that make Salesforce.com brittle. Like eBay, making wholesale changes to the core architecture is expensive, complicated, and risky if the fix doesn’t work. Google, for its part, is cheerleading Google and providing some coaching. What’s Google get from the deal? Well, it’s not just exposure to the ways of enterprise cloud computing. Google is able to learn from the Salesforce.com efforts. I think of the Google-Salesforce.com tie up like a lab experiment. Salesforce.com also has some tasty multi-tenant technology. This invention virtualizes virtualized infrastructures. So, yoiu have an application. You run it so it is stable, scalable, and reasonably reliable. Then you allow different companies to use the application as if that application was dedicated to the one company. Everything is partitioned. Very cool stuff indeed.
Second, the reference to the “same infrastruture” is one of those phrases that carry a truck load of meaning. I remember a teacher in a required literature class making us talk in depth about William Carlos Williams’ phrase “red wheelbarrow”. The phrase “same infrastructure” means that the goodies running on the Google infrastructure can–at some point in time of Google’s choosing–be made available to an enterprise. Want to crunch 20 years’ American Express credit card data for the week before Mother’s Day in New York City? Today AMEX cannot do this without some work. With the Google data management infrastructure, the query is not only trivial. The query will return results in a fraction of the time American Express’ MBAs now wait. This is–believe me–a very big deal.
Third, Mr. Chandra says clealy that what Google built to do Web search has now, after a decade–that’s 10 years of Internet time–is tuned for Web applications. I suppose Google could buy a billboard on Times Square, but the company is crystal clear in telling Mr. Henchen and his readers that Google is an application platform. Yoiu can read more about how a Web search system works like a big distributed laptop in my 2005 study The Google Legacy here. Note: this is also dull and long, stuffed with technical diagrams that explain why Microsoft and Yahoo are lagging Messrs. Brin and Page in online services.
And, finally (actually fourthly), Mr. Chandra lays out the strategic thrust of Google. Google has been using this phrase for a number of years. I think I have a note somewhere that the first use of the phrase was in 2001. Google is not a wacky math club. Google is a supra-national enterprise that competitors, regulators, and mavens are just now–after a decade in Internet time–beginning to perceive in its broad outlines. It’s thrilling that ComScore and NetRatings report that Google has a two thirds share of the search market, but the take make it very tough to look at Act II at Google. My research suggests that ACT II will be a compelling event to watch from the sidelines. I don’t want to be under one of Googzilla’s paws when the beast heads for the Fortune 100 in earnest. Keep in mind that as Google “hooks” young folks, these little Googlers will pull Google into the enterprise. Hence, the consumer becomes the enterprise customer. An ad in eWeek or CIO won’t stop this type of demographic play.
Net net: Kudos to Doug Henschen for getting a Googler to talk. I love to watch the Jedi knights at Google run the game plan. The tactic is one that an NFL owner can understand. Senior managers at IBM and Oracle? I’m not sure.
Stephen Arnoold, July 22, 2008
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