Online Social Networking & Business Collaboration World – Paul Slakey

Bringing together social networks and business collaboration makes sense.

The enterprise is becoming more social. From personal productivity to power collaborator.

Software as a service and cloud computing are pointing to the same thing.

We have created a suite of tools that we think makes sense for business: Google Apps.

Have recently added video. It will be interesting to see how this used by business. Not just training video, but allowing staff to upload videos. This could be of internal presentations or any number of other things.

Can create mashups – bringing enterprise data with public information. People have invested too much in their installed software to change that, so need to merge what they have and external data.

Video chat integrated with Gmail can facilitate better communication.

There are more than 10 million users on Google Apps, with accelerating pick-up over the last months. This counts the number of people who have used it in the last seven days, not just the number of accounts. There are 3000 new businesses signing up for Google Apps every day. There are many major companies using it. Genentech recently decided to shift all of its desktops over to Google Apps. Typically small pilots go to bigger groups, and sometimes migrate all their users.

There is far faster innovation in the cloud than installed software. Continuous updates (53 major features so far this year), and tapping customer innovation in real-time. Arizona State University, trying to keep their platform current, moved first their students then their staff onto Google Apps, with now 50,000 users.

Cloud computing gives economies of scale. Massive storage is required, far cheaper in big data centers. Cost per user rapidly goes down with scale.

Reliability needs to be addressed. The reality is that hosted apps can be more reliable than in-house apps. Gmail is down around 20 minutes per year.

Cloud computing is still missionary job – are collaborating with salesforce.com to evangelize. Salesforce.com offers great example of good integration, a key issue.

Chrome is far faster for running business apps – it is an initiative to ensure that user experience is no compromised in a web environment.

Android will accelerate online apps, by integrating with Google Apps. The Android marketplace will tap innovation. The reason we’re investing our energy in this is that the mobile experience is still too clunku – we want it to be as powerful as your desktop experience.

The Google App Engine provides resources for developers.