Google: A safe choice for the enterprise?

Yesterday we held an afternoon seminar on Google in the Enterprise in London. With case studies from the Guardian newspaper and the WWF in Geneva, it was very interesting to learn from the experiences from two large and complex organisations that have both adopted many different Google tools.

In the subsequent discussion, I mentioned the lack of a public roadmap for the many Google tools as a high risk factor for enterprise buyers. Roadmaps can provide you with valuable information on new features, but Google has traditionally been very secretive about future releases. A delegate mentioned that roadmaps from more traditional enterprise software vendors tend to be worthless anyway, as they are constantly amended.

Another risk factor that we touched on was cloud computing. Some trust cloud computing entirely and see many benefits while others are more sceptical. GNU founder Richard Stallman is one of those who has called cloud computing a trap. When thinking about moving your data into the cloud, it is worth remembering that very few, if any at all, have experience with migrating data away from the Google offerings. While it might be easy to get started with a Google tool, how do you actually move you data out, say from Docs, Analytics or Sites? It seemed like few in the audience had a migration plan in place for this eventuality. For more background on cloud computing, I recommend the recent article on In Cloud We Trust? from ReadWriteWeb.

Yet another risk factor that came up in the discussion, is the fact that Google still gets the vast majority of revenue from advertising. It amounts to approximately 97 % according to the recent Q4 Financial Summary from Google. One delegate predicted that Google might receive increasing pressure from shareholders to focus more on the revenue generating products, e.g. Urchin, GSA and Message Security, rather than the many products that are free of charge, e.g. Groups, Blogger and Sites. Disclaimer: I am no financial analyst, so I might be interpreting the numbers wrongly.

Google is a safe vendor, in the sense that they are among the least likely vendors to go bankrupt. However, when revenue from enterprise solutions is such a small share, it is historically not a safe choice for buyers. Big vendors kill products all the time, just like Microsoft did a few years ago with Microsoft CMS 2002 which is still used around the world, but is no longer improved.