Google and Cloud Puffs
November 2, 2009
Editor’s Note: I am translating a conference session talk. It could be construed as a pitch for Google. That’s not what Beyond Search does, so this summary is all my own. Just a heads up. Jessica Bratcher
Google’s Michael Lock, director of Americas Sales & Operations, Google Enterprise, gave a spirited talk called “Top 5 Lessons Learned Selling and Marketing Cloud-based Computing” at the SIIA OnDemand 2009 conference, http://www.siia.net/OnDemand/2009/default.asp, in San Jose, CA, on Friday. An admitted former software salesman, Lock had a lot to say, including Cloud=Good, Software/Middleware=Bad. It was a stark statement, and he made a really great argument for apps out in the cloud.
Let me summarize Lock’s five lessons as related to moi. I’m a cloud-based computing Google apps user. Why?
- It’s a free storage system. There’s only so much memory on my laptop. I hate my external hard drive because it was expensive, it’s clunky, and Vista won’t let me copy stuff off of it. I’ve been through at least five thumb drives in the past year. It’s comforting to know that if my laptop were stolen or if my hard drive fizzled again, all my stuff wouldn’t be on it and lost.
- It’s fast to access from anywhere, and in some cases whether I have an Internet connection or not. I can be at home, at Panera, in an airport, or at my mother’s.
- It’s password-secured. As long as I have that password, I can access my stuff from anywhere and from computers not my own. Not that I have a pressing need for data security, but I don’t have to deal with security updates. Every. Other. Day.
- It’s part of a cheap (or for me, an individual, free!) suite of interrelated products. You know how expensive a Microsoft Office Suite is. Ouch.
- I don’t have to deal with learning/using Office or similar software to make my work happen. Lock mentioned the agony of upgrading from MS 2003 to 2007. I felt that pain keenly.
Lock made two strong points in favor of using/buying cloud-based computed related to that fifth bullet: “Legacy vendors will fight to prevent this with their very lives… Microsoft Office generates 16 to 18 billion dollars… they will throw mud, say it’s not secure, say it’s not functional.”
FYI: There are more than 20 million users on Google Apps, from government to higher education to small enterprise businesses that don’t even have offices, servers, or shopping cart software. His other point was that the pace of innovation in the cloud is accelerating. Google had 97 major feature releases in 2009, 68 in 2008. How many major updates has Microsoft had since 2000? Lock said Google has an enterprise vision to make the cloud-based apps broader, deeper, more functional, simpler to use, highly extensible, massively scalable–the figurative sky is not the limit.
Jessica Bratcher, November 2, 2009
Dear Fish & Wildlife Service, I, Stephen Arnold, paid Ms. Bratcher for this write up.
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One Response to “Google and Cloud Puffs”
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Cloud computing offers tremendous benefits to the enterprise and to consumers. I would say, at the risk of tracking mud on the proverbial carpet, that those that utilize cloud computing for handling confidential data worth stealing ought to consider the security of the client computers used by end-users to access these valuable services:
http://www.blueridgenetworks.com/securitynowblog/cloud-computing-endpoint-security-data-leakage-risk
Also, in the post above, I explain why I believe cloud computing will be more secure in some ways than do-it-yourself approaches.