Last week Google held its customer event in Sydney, Atmosphere14. capioIT was intrigued to find that front and centre at the entrance was a bowl of lemons. I can only guess that Google was going to make lemonade from lemons, sadly, whilst the day had moments of sweetness, Google could not set up the lemonade stand this time around.
As an online consumer brand Google, only has Facebook and on a good day, Microsoft within range. The translation of this to the enterprise space, whilst successful on many other organisations benchmarks, has not been successful enough on a Google scale.
At the Australian event Google proved that it has a range of offerings that enterprises need, particularly in the collaboration and mapping/location space. The collaboration benefits of Google Docs are transformative, as is the ability to use location to drive improved outcomes for buyers and data for sellers.
At capioIT we believe that flaws sit in two key areas. The integration across the enterprise of Google is limited and the Google Compute offering is seriously lagging the other scale public cloud providers.
It was clear that Google enterprise cannot pinpoint an overarching and integrated core customer. They sell to a range of stakeholders, marketing, HR, technology etc, but there is no overriding core customer and limited integration across the client. Whilst it is a strong benefit to have such a diverse client base, if it is to be a truly transformational vendor for the enterprise it needs to fill the gaps, connect the dots, and offer and end to end capability
The Google Compute strategy is much weaker in the overall Asia Pacific region as well as ANZ. A data centre in Taiwan may be great from an ecological efficiency point of view, but it is not likely to interest too many customers in markets such as Singapore, Australia and India. As capioIT highlighted last week, Australia in particular is going to have a surplus of enterprise public cloud providers by year end – see As AWS dominates, Rackspace grows, and IBM, Microsoft and Cisco arrive by year end, does Australia need a sixth global IaaS provider . Despite being a much feared potential competitor in the IaaS market it needs to scale out much more quickly across the Asia Pacific market than it is doing to date. Organisations in key Asia Pacific markets such as China, Singapore, India, Japan and Australia are expecting their global providers to operate locally with in country presence.
Another point that highlighted the comparative lag of Google in the enterprise space was that the crowd was well below that of Amazon Web Services and salesforce at their customer events held in Australia this year. AWS and salesforce set the agenda; if Google wants to be a dominant provider then it must do the same.
Capture Point
Whilst at a product level Google has significant differentiation in the market it needs to do more to really challenge other enterprise providers as a top tier vendor. Integration across the product set and customer requirements is critical as is accelerated investment in cloud compute capabilities.