Google and Salesforce.com: The Plot Thickens
December 8, 2008
For years, I have heard that Google had an interest in Salesforce.com. In my for-fee briefings, I dig into the Salesforce.com technology for multi tenant applications. I am certainly no wizard in the magical world of patent documents, but I thought some of the Salesforce.com methods were somewhat elaborate. In those briefings, I commented that Google seemed to have another approach that exploited some of its more unusual inventions. One example is the elaborate system to determine the context of a user. I refer to these as the Guha patent documents. There are others, of course. My point is that Google seemed to be building functions into its broader data management and container operations. (Please, don’t write and ask me for these briefings. I don’t release that type of information into the wild nor in these largely recycled Web log musings.)
I read “Force.com + Google App Engine = Cloud Relationship Management” by Steve Gillmor here with thought, “Yep, the GOOG is on the move.” Mr. Gillmor’s write up’s lead paragraph hit the nail on the head. He wrote on December 7, 2008, “Salesforce and Google have extended their strategic partnership with Force.com for the Google App Engine.” His article provides useful technical background and some observations about Google’s approach to an “operating system.” You will want to read this article and then save it to your GoogleOnTheMove folder.
My take on this expanded use of the Google App Engine reaches outside the boundaries of Mr. Gillmor’s story. My thoughts are:
- Google gets Salesforce.com to hook into more Google technology without significant risk or cost. If Salesforce.com’s multi-tenant technology is suitably impressive, Google could increase its involvement with Salesforce.com. If the merged clouds don’t work too well, Google has learned possibly significant information about the Salesforce.com approach.
- Google receives valuable information about such factors as the efficiency of the Salesforce.com system
- Google has a reasonably well-controlled lab test for hooking clouds together. The Salesforce.com cloud is more of a wrapper around the data stores at the core of Salesforce.com. Google is more of a next-generation cloud engineered to minimize certain types of bottlenecks associated with traditional database management systems.
Salesforce.com, on the other hand, has more marketing clout. I have heard that the Google relationship makes otherwise dry explanations of multi-tenant technology more interesting. Who knows? Sales presentations are like magic. What you see is often not what allows the magician to entertain and enthrall the audience.
The big loser in the deal is Microsoft. The Google and Salesforce.com relationship comes at a time when Microsoft is making a push for its Dynamics system. Customers will want to hear about the new Google-Salesforce.com deal. That can complicate some procurements and maybe derail some others.
But the best is that Google still retains its freedom with regard to CRM. Google can still buy Salesforce.com or it can pass. Google can sign similar cloud federation deals with other vendors, or at some point, stitch together existing Google services to offer its own cloud-based CRM solution. To sum up, the Google is once again using its mass to distort the enterprise information market. Google’s “dark matter” lets it exert influence in ways that can be difficult to detect.
Stephen Arnold, December 8, 2008
Arnold White Study Published
December 8, 2008
Galatea has published Successful Enterprise Search Management by Stephen E. Arnold and Martin White. The authors are widely known for their research and consulting in search and information management. An interview with Martin White is here.
The study approaches the management aspect of search in information-dense environments: Ineffective information access can make the difference between an organization meeting its goals and actually going out of business. Managers spend up to two hours a day searching for information, and more than 50% of the information they obtain has no value to them.
To support its advice, the book outlines case studies and references to specific vendors’ systems while offering practical guidance on how to better manage key elements of enterprise search including planning, preparation, implementation, and adaptation. Specific topics addressed include text mining and advanced content processing, information governance, and the challenges language itself presents.
“This book will be of value to any organization seeking to get the best out of its current search implementation, considering whether to upgrade the implementation or starting the process of specifying and selecting enterprise search software,” co-author Martin White said.
A detailed summary of the contents of the 130 page report is available on the Galatea Web site here. You can order a copy, which costs about US$200Â here. A number of the longer essays in the Beyond Search Web log consists of information excised from the final report.
Stephen Arnold, December 8, 2008
Autonomy Firmware Technologies Deal
December 8, 2008
On December 3, 2008, Autonomy said that it had inked a deal with Firmware Technologies, an Australian company. Firmware has an OEM deal for Autonomy’s IDOL (Intelligent Data Operating Layer). Firmware will use IDOL for search and content processing in Firmware’s vistime product. The enterprise version of vistime is, according to the company’s Web site delivers “virtual meetings”. In addition,
With the Enterprise Edition you receive a customized, integrated enterprise solution that you can use for a variety of purposes: virtual meetings can replace traveling and accelerate decision-making processes, support becomes more efficient, Internet-based informational events reach large numbers of participants and target groups like journalists, customers, employees, and partners.
Autonomy has more than 350 OEM customers, according to Stouffer Egan, CEO of Autonomy, Inc. A number of search and content processing vendors are pursuing OEM deals. The idea is to make search available to users, or what I call a “just there” implementation.
Stephen Arnold, December 10, 2008
Google: Putting Capex on a Diet
December 8, 2008
The point to keep in mind is that Google has been working for a decade to build out its infrastructure. One of the benefits of the company’s willingness to tackle hard engineering problems is that Google obtains a better return on its hardware dollar. Data included in my 2005, The Google Legacy suggested that Google can spend a dollar and get as much as five times to performance that a non-Googlized data center would get. The data appeared in Google technical papers. Some of these papers were written by big Googlers; others by small Googlers. What the performance data share is information that provides a glimpse of the computing capability in Google’s data centers. If we flip the performance data around, a competitor would have to invest as much as five times what Google spends to get comparable performance. Is Google’s engineering that cost effective? Well, a five hundred percent performance boost may be optimistic, but when a data center can cost $600 million the implications are interesting. A competitor would have to spend more than Google to match Google’s performance on data manipulation, disk reads, and queries per second. Let’s assume that Google gets a 25 percent boost. For a competitor to match Google’s performance, the competitor would have to have the known bottlenecks under control and then spend another $125 million which makes a $600 million data center hit the books at $725 million. If you pick a larger performance boost such as two hundred percent, the $600 million data center will require $1.2 billion in capex to match Google’s capacity. Of course, no one would believe that Google wrings such a performance advantage from its commodity hardware. Competitors prefer branded equipment. What’s in the back of my mind is that Google may be keeping its cards close to its chest.
The Washington Post’s “Google Turns Down Some of NC’s Tax Incentives” explains that the economic downturn, among other factors, may be causing Google to trim its capital expenditures. The Washington Post here quotes a letter Google sent to North Carolina officials. For me the key phrase was:
While Google “remains pleased and committed to its Lenoir operations,” economic conditions make it too difficult to be sure the $600 million data center complex will expand as fast as previously thought, the letter said. “Yet the company fully expects to achieve employment and capital investment levels that are consistent with those that the state announced in 2007,” Charlotte attorney John N. Hunter wrote on behalf of Google.
The Google capex expenditures are going to become more important. The economic downturn is affecting most organizations, and I think the GOOG may be battening down its hatches. Good Morning Silicon Valley takes this position. You can read its take on the capex shift here.
What happens if Google does trim its capex for data centers? Maybe Microsoft’s new data centers will leap frog over Google? Google could find itself on the wrong side of high performance if Microsoft builds its own super performance innovations into its data centers. What the Washington Post makes clear is that Google is slowing down at least in North Carolina. The Google may be trying to trim costs by rethinking certain investments. This is another sign of Google’s increasing maturity and could indicate the opening that Microsoft needs to hobble the search Googzilla.
Stephen Arnold, December 6, 2008
Arnold on Disintermediation in New Italian Compendium
December 8, 2008
December 2008 is shaping up as a busy book month. I received on December 6, 2008, my copy of “Galassia Web: La Cultura nella Rete”, published by Civita Associazione with the support of Boeing. I contributed a chapter that begins on page 67 and ending on page 80. My contribution was “Giochi di Open Access e altre nuove tecnologie di communicazione: la tentazione disintermediazion”. If your Italian is a bit rusty, the approximate English translation is “The Interplay of Open Access and Other New Technologies.”
The main point of my contribution hinges on Disintermediation. Institutions such as museums and libraries want to provide an online catalog and some type of access to the information under their stewardship. But large companies such as Google are slowly aggregating a broad range of content. For now, commercial enterprises have not shown a desire to create an aggregated service that includes indexes, images, music, and other information public institutions have created. The risk is that unless groups of institutions take the lead in aggregation, the commercial service may by default become the library or the museum for Internet users. In short, the disintermediation that ravaged commercial online services and corporate libraries may now have an impact on the information now in the control of universities, public agencies, privately-endowed institutions, and governmental entities. I don’t have a timeline but I make the point that acting in a parochial way may waste time. Action can provide a countermeasure for the forces of disintermediation.
I want to send a happy quack to the publisher, Moira Macpherson, and the editorial team that made this collection of essays a reality. So, here comes, “Quack!”
Stephen Arnold, December 8, 2008
Yahoo Jumping Ahead of Google
December 7, 2008
On December 7, 2008, PCWorld reported that Yahoo will offer abstracts, not laundry lists of search results. The news story I saw appeared in the Yahoo technology news service. You can read “Yahoo Technology Will Offer Abstracts of Search Results” here. If the link goes dead, try the PCWorld site itself here. When I saw the story, the search engine on the PCWorld site couldn’t locate the story. Nothing new there, of course. The key point in the unsigned article was that Yahoo’s Bangalore research facility has figure out how to abstract key information on the page. The idea is that when a user searches for “hotel”, the system would provide an address, map, and other information. I described a similar function in my description of Google’s dossier function. See US20070198481. According to the news story, Yahoo will roll out this service in 2009. My thought is that these types of smart services work really well when described on paper. The value of these “reports” or “answer” type systems is that language can be tricky. Google’s approach relies on “context”, a system and method disclosed in the February 2007 patent documents filed by Google’s Ramanathan Guha. My hunch is that Yahoo went public because of the rumors that Google was starting to use some of its niftier technology in certain public facing services. The Googler with whom I had interaction in London knew zero about the dossier function. Maybe Yahoo is trying to jump ahead of Google. We’ll see. I think Yahoo needs to address the shortcomings of its core search service first.
Stephen Arnold, December 7, 2008
Another SharePoint Goodie: Minimal Deployment Infrastructure
December 7, 2008
In London, I got a real laugh from my audience of about 200 people. Usually the audience boos and throws balls of paper at me. I heard several people talking about the low cost of SharePoint and how the basic install ran so well on available hardware. I did not address these cheerful thoughts directly. I showed a diagram of a recommended SharePoint deployment process, and the audience howled. Developed by a certified partner, the diagram is so complex it is overwhelming. Imagine my delight when I came across “The Minimal Full Deployment Infrastructure” for SharePoint. You must read the write up here. Chris Mullendore, the author, provides a useful discussion of why the minimal deployment is needed for SharePoint. For example, he explains some considerations for using SharePoint in a virtual and non-virtual environment. The non-virtual part is needed to test original code with third-party code and to perform load and performance testing. I know most SharePoint users are quite happy with the snappiness of a SharePoint system. To find out how snappy and how to make SharePoint even more speedy, you have to have a minimal deployment. So what’s a minimal deployment include. Here’s the diagram from Mr. Mullendore’s write up:
The minimal set up is a combination of virtual and non-virtual systems. Counting the non-virtual systems–what I would call servers–one needs only 11 servers. When I hear azure-chip or gray-chip consultants (these are consultants who have not worked at Bain, BCG, Booz, or McKinsey) talk about SharePoint’s low cost and ease of use, I marvel at their “wisdom”.
What’s the minimal hardware you are using for your SharePoint system. Have you been able to get by with fewer than 11 servers? What’s the actual number of servers a large SharePoint installation requires. Recommendations such as Mr. Mullendore’s are not easy to get in my experience.
Stephen Arnold, December 7, 2008
Google Selling Its G1 Phone Directly
December 7, 2008
Michael Oryl’s “Google Selling Unlocked T-Mobile G1 as Android Dev 1” here reports that developers can buy an unlocked G1 for $400. You have to pay $25 to become a Google developer. Once that bit of housekeeping is out of the way, you can get the Android Dev 1, which is like the T-Mobile G1, except for two features:
- No SIM is included
- No bootloader lock.
Should you by one? If you want to develop an application for the phone, sure. Do you want to buy one to use on a long commute? Nope. The battery life is not sufficient for a two-hour session of yapping and surfing.
Start the buying process here.
Stephen Arnold, December 7, 2008
SharePoint Thesaurus Tool
December 7, 2008
I know you love SharePoint as much as I do. With taxonomies quite the hot ticket, I have wondered how to create a word list for SharePoint quickly. Mauro Cardarelli has come to my rescue and maybe yours too? His”SharePoint Thesaurus Utility” here provides nifty Excel file and macro to make my life a little easier when pumping SharePoint full of terms. One of the clever twists in SharePoint thesaurus file is that the thesaurus won’t work if a term is duplicated. Now I know this makes a difference in organizations where meta is a term, meta-data is a term and meta-meta-data are valid terms. You can download the Excel file here. If the link is dead, you can hunt through the postings at http://blogs.officezealot.com/mauro. A happy quack to Mr. Cardarelli as well.
Stephen Arnold, December 7, 2008
The Google Operating System: Myth or Reality
December 7, 2008
“Does Google have a Secret OS?” by Andy Patrizio appeared in Internet News on December 4, 2008 here. I found the write up to be thought provoking. Mr. Patrizio makes it clear that Google did not his direct questions. Like many Google watchers, he must rely on other types of information to tackle the question of the secret Google operating system. The acronym GOS is quite close to goose, and I have been reluctant to land on a hard “yes” as the answer to this question. The main point of Mr. Patrizio’s article is that Android, the Google operating system for mobile phones, may be a first step. Mr. Patrizio pointed to Rob Enderle, one of the big dogs at that consultancy, for this comment:
Such an OS would be an expanded version of the Android OS the company recently released for mobile phones, said Rob Enderle, principal analyst for The Enderle Group. “They were clear they were going to go down this direction, with a platform that largely lives off the cloud with Google apps,” he told InternetNews.com. Look at it as the Android concept expanded to a PC.”
Forbes’ Magazine added fuel to the Google operating system fire with its “Google’s Invisibility Cloak” here by Elizabeth Woyke.
The new data showed that a percentage of Internet users in Google’s offices (principally based in the company’s Mountain View headquarters) are using an operating system that essentially shields itself from detection by stripping traffic of identifying information. Vizzacarro describes this data, known as a user agent, as a string of information that a computer uses to identify itself. Removing it (possibly via a proxy server) means that outsiders like Net Applications can’t tell which operating system a particular Web user is using. (Net Applications uses other methods, like a Web site’s JavaScript to detect other information about a user and determine that the traffic is coming from Google.) About 11% of Google’s Web traffic currently shows up like this. The level fluctuates daily, Vizzacarro says. A few days ago it was around 30%.
My hunch is that Google has been plugging away on various technical challenges. However, Google seems content to tap into public facing carnival show only when it must. I think Android, Chrome, individualized Google and the other software components are designed to make specific operations possible in tightly controlled ways. At some point, Google may abandon its component-by-component approach.
My research into Google’s patent documents suggests that Google has moved through several eras of software development in the firm’s 10 year history. Like Google’s potential energy in publishing, the company exposes only what must be exposed to allow a specific type of operation to occur. Google has quite a few components which are not available to users and partners. In my opinion, what Google will eventually have on offer will be code components that permit more and more sophisticated operations to occur.
At some point, enough components will be available so an observer can say, “Look, Google really has an operating system.” If a person asserts that a Google operating system is ready for release, Google will probably pull another Searchology type of public relations play to regain control of the information stream.
A better question is, “Does Google make available its full array of software components and services to most Google engineers or just to the top ranking Google fellows, scientists, and technical wizards?” Anyone have data to share?
Stephen Arnold, December 7, 2008
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