Google held its first ever Google Enterprise roadshow, “Gone Google!”, at the St Regis hotel in Singapore yesterday. I was quite keen to find out more about “moving to Google”, and particularly about how and why local businesses are taking the plunge. I wondered if any Singapore government offices might have moved to Google Apps, and I thought it was probably highly unlikely.
I was told, however, that our Building and Construction Authority has gone Google. I’m not sure what exactly that means, because when I tried to verify that by looking up DNS entries, it seems Google isn’t handling their email. It’s possible that they are not using Google for email, or perhaps they are but emails are still channeled through their own email gateways.
There were two parts to the event. The first focused on selling Google Apps (or Google Enterprise). It answers the what and why questions: what Google Apps is, what does it do, why you might want to move to it, why does it help your organization, etc. The other part is a customer panel discussion, where representatives from three companies who have gone Google share their conversion experiences. I felt that the customer panel discussion was too unreal: the representatives were totally exceedingly positive about Google Apps, too unbelievably pro-Google.
But nevertheless, it set me thinking about how I might start getting Google Apps adopted in my organization. The way people work is changing rapidly in recent years, thanks to ubiquitous mobile converged communications. I hear that an IDA report says that there is 99% mobile internet (i.e. the likes of smartphones) penetration in Singapore. The way companies view IT has also changed with the advent of cloud computing. A Gartner report predicts that by 2012, 20% of businesses will own no IT assets.
So why do we want to still run email, directory and calendaring applications? We still have many other applications, but I wonder if there is any value add for us to continue running the kind of basic applications offered by Google Apps. It’s time for us to think critically about why we are doing the things we are currently doing.
The biggest business concerns are probably going to be the legal and data security issues. But if we can outsource some of these basic services, it will free up IT manpower to focus on building more innovative services for the business.
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