Enterprising ‘App’etites

Google’s global dominance has come about via a combination of hard work, innovation and the ability to respond to consumer needs. Attributes – Managing Director for Google Enterprise EMEA Adrian Joseph tells CXO – that are now transferring well to the corporate world.

“The shared component is very important, because that enables us to drive continuous innovation.”
-Adrian Joseph

As Managing Director for Google Enterprise EMEA, what are the main strategies for business that you are currently implementing?

Adrian Joseph. At Google Enterprise, we are a business that essentially covers four product groups.  So, the first is search - taking our search technology that most people are familiar with - and putting it into businesses. So, this could be helping them to find stuff within their own businesses a lot easier, or helping their customers to find stuff on their websites more easily. So, search is one our core elements, and that's where we started the Enterprise business.

The second product is geo - so taking Google Earth and Google Maps and opening up APIs to allow businesses to use our technology to overlay stuff that they find interesting or their customers find interesting. The third part is what we call posturing, which was implemented about two and half years ago. So, it's anti-virus, security managing and an archiving and discovery tool. And then the fourth one is Google Apps, which is essentially a suite of components, which include Gmail. But not what I call traditional email, so within the email suite, for example, you can instant message, you can do it in 47 languages instantaneously. And you can do things like video chat, for example.

The next part of Google Apps is Docs. These are spreadsheets, presentation packages, word processing packages, etc., but the key to its success is its real time collaboration.  So, in the existing model, the traditional model - what people tend to do is to work on a spreadsheet - email it out to five or six or however many different people, and everybody makes a change and sends it back.

Well, our app is quite different.  What we do is to create this central space, and then invite people to collaborate, and we can all be working on the same documents simultaneously.  This sort of technology - bringing our experience of the consumer side to our business and delivering enterprise-ready features like those - is what Google Enterprise does.

Can you explain how the technology Google Enterprise is introducing enables better business collaboration and access to information.

AJ. One example would be websites: the ability to create Internets within your own business, and being able to do so without having to go to the IT Department. Users can set this stuff up themselves. They can invite people in to interact because such collaboration is built into sites. There is also video for the business, such as our YouTube technology and bringing it into the enterprise. We try to imagine a world where users within businesses can access their stuff at any time, and can become what I like to describe as 'super-productive nomads'.

These nomads can access information when they are out and about, and can collaborate in real time. At the same time as delivering empowerment to users and making them these super-productive nomads, we're also driving innovation within businesses.

We demonstrate a very strong link between collaboration and innovation - a correlation of 0.81, which is pretty phenomenal. So we are driving innovation but doing that as well at much lower cost. So this obviously brings me on to my view of cloud computing at a macro level - it's about super-productive nomads. It's about continuous innovation. And it's about real empowerment of the users.

Cloud computing has been touted as the best option for business to cut costs and carbon footprints, but there are still numerous concerns about data security, so what do you say to those who still harbour worry?

AJ. I think it's a very important question, and one that we feel very strongly about.  The cloud absolutely delivers many of these benefits that I have spoke about. Not all clouds are equal. So maybe you just have to describe at a more technical level a definition of clouds. 

There are three core components to that. One is that it's hosted, so it is run by a third party outside of that business. What that means is we can bring real economies of skill. Two, it is on shared infrastructure, and for us that means a true, multi-talent environment where we take our data and distribute it across a number of data centres, but we guard that, we - while encrypt is not quite the right word - but we do something similar to encryption. It is almost like if you gave me a letter, and what I did was to encrypt it, and then put it through a shredder, and take all those little pieces and distribute it across a number of centres. That is what we do.

So the shared component is very important, because that enables us to drive continuous innovation. It gives us huge economy of skill. Now the third component of cloud, for us, is in the browser; it is Internet based, and Google Apps is entirely in the browser as an icon upon your desktop - there are no other installations on your desktop, or on servers, or any other complexity around that. So, those are some of the components that are important to understand about our definition of cloud.

Just to your question about security, actually the right question to be asking - I think there are three components from a Google perspective that are important to understand. The first is about control.  So, what we do is to give the administrators of our Google Apps system the ability to give different permissions for usage of the different parts of Google Apps. They can look at usage data and so on, so control is an important element of that. 

The second part is trust, because I think trust is at the heart of the question, as is providing confidence. So Google is SASS 70 Type II certified. That means that every year, external auditors come in. They look at our systems, our processes, and so forth, and if we are up to scratch then we get that certification - which we've got.

The other part of confidence that is important to bring out is Safe Harbour: we meet US and EU Safe Harbour requirements. Under Safe Harbour there are seven different components - things like access, storage, and so forth - that you have to meet standards by which, again, is something that we do.

And the third point is giving people choice.  With our data liberation movement what we try to do is make it easy for people to move into Google Apps, transfer their data in, but we also try to make it easy for them to take their data back out. So, those three points of control, confidence, and choice are, I think, critical to understanding the context of trusting Google Enterprise.

How else is Google Enterprise working toward making Google technology more readily available and easy to use for businesses?

AJ. At the heart of our DNA we obsess over our users and we obsess over innovation.  So, we have taken our experience and reach - we now have over 300 million users of Google Apps - to do something quite different. At Google, our model of innovation is quite different. It is not the very traditional, software level of spending a few years designing and a couple of years doing build, then a couple more years trying to convince the businesses to adopt the latest version.

Our innovation cycle is every one to two weeks, where we are uploading new or improved features within Google Apps, and we are doing that seamlessly. If you think about the experience of users when they go home, they have access to things like Facebook, to Google Search, to LinkedIn. I think those users have got accustomed to continuous innovation being delivered to them in a way that doesn't disrupt their lives.

And so we take that experience. We can expose a slice of that massive base to our new innovation. We see how they react to it and then we make it available to wider enterprise business. But before we get to that stage we do something that we call 'dog fooding', which is to expose our own - Google's - employees to these innovations.

And we have some very experienced users, some critical users. So, we test it on ourselves and a portion of the consumer database, and then we open it up to the enterprise.

How has the Android platform helped Google to deliver its aims and strategies?

AJ. The reason that we got behind Android is because we wanted to ensure openness, which is one of the key characteristic of what I've described as Google's DNA. Previously it was really hard for developers to create a great application and expose that to a large community of users. The reason for that is because you have to create apps that were specific either to handset manufacturers or a carrier. And so Android was developed to enable much large distribution and openness of the web in a mobile platform.

The same is true of some of the work that we are doing with Chrome OS, the Chrome operating system. This is really transformative in the sense that our belief is that we can deliver applications, and we can deliver an operating system that is entirely based in the web. So take it out of the desktop, make sure that it is really secure and safe. For instance, imagine opening up a notebook in four or five seconds from cold start and having access to all of your stuff. And imagine it not mattering if you'd lost that notebook because all of your stuff would be based in the cloud, in a secure way.  You could just go back into the IT Department or to the shop and get another one, and you would have all of your stuff ready and available. These are some of the core benefits that we see of cloud computing.

And one of the questions we get asked is 'how secure is the cloud?' But one of the questions that I'm increasingly seeing big businesses asking themselves is 'how secure is my existing infrastructure and IT applications?' Quite a lot of them are actually finding that in moving to the Google cloud, it is many times more secure than their existing systems.

How is online collaboration affecting innovation and idea-generation in the workplace?

AJ. If you think back over time, one of the limitations of innovation has been geography. If we were able, centuries ago, to connect some of the great thinkers to one another, innovation might have flourished - the sharing of ideas might have flourished and been disseminated much more rapidly. And that is the power of the technology that we bring in terms of real time collaboration.

The research that we did recently with The Future Foundation showed this almost perfect line between collaboration and innovation. I don't think there is a business that I have come across that isn't interested in driving innovation within their businesses. We know that there are some barriers to making that happen now, some of which are around cost. But some other barriers are around vision, the management having the vision and experience to give empowerment to their teams.

Do you find that access to such easy collaboration helps to create a different corporate structure by breaking down entrenched hierarchies?

AJ. Well, I think what it does is it enables everybody to have a voice and to be able to articulate that. We know that employees, if they were incentivised in the right sort of ways, then more than half of them say they would come up with even more creative ideas. This is all about recognition and reward, and our collaboration tools help to enable that. So, I think businesses are missing out on a huge opportunity to tap into the internal wisdom that exists across their businesses, irrespective of hierarchical structure.

What advice would you offer to IT directors and CIOs in relation to the types of technologies they should be implementing for their business?

AJ. One of the things I would note is that if you look at some of the research, only 12 percent of employees are happy with the technology that is available to them in the office. So there is this huge disconnect, this dissonance between our experience in the home and our experience in the office. I don't think this dissonance is sustainable for much longer. So one piece of advice I would offer is to think through how businesses can tap into the technologies that people are using in their homes and bring those into their businesses in a safe, secure way, to drive innovation and to reduce cost.

Companies like Jaguar, Land Rover, Rentokill, Valero and Motorola have all gone Google for these reasons. Also, if you think through the relationship between IT and HR, as well, our hypothesis is that there are opportunities for those departments to work more closely to drive innovation, recognise it, and reward it. But they need to work in unison to make that happen.

Those would be some of the things that I would be saying to IT directors. I would encourage them to realise that not all clouds are born equal. Google was born in a cloud, this is where we started up. All of the Google Apps Suite sits in the same infrastructure that we run Google Search and Google Maps on, so if Google Apps fails for us then we have a much more serious problem than in running and managing our own business.

So, I would say be clear about the cloud and what that really means. Experiment with it, try it, test it. Speak to others who have gone down that route and see what their experiences have been. Do not underestimate the cultural aspects of this change. It is not just a technology change, so it is important to ensure that there is a strong management communication plan around any sort of innovative implementation. KLM, for example, adopted Google Apps a few months ago, and the most interesting thing they told us from their experience was the feedback they received from their cabin crew. They discovered that most of their cabin crew, over 50 percent, were already using Gmail for their own personal use. This is that user experience I mentioned; this dissonance between our home experiences and our work experiences cannot be sustained.

How far is Google from bridging this dissonance, in both a cultural and a technical sense?

AJ. I think the challenge is not a technology challenge any longer. I don't think it has been for some time now. There is an author called Nicolas Clark who wrote a number of articles, in one of them he made the comparison to electricity.

If you think back many years ago, companies were generating their own electricity.  They had their own generators on site. It is a business critical resource, and obviously over time that has been outsourced - we trust the electricity companies to consistently deliver what we need. So it is this paradigm shift in the way that we think about technology, and cloud computing in particular, that is the major blocker, not the technology itself.

A lot of the investment in IT at the moment is about keeping the lights on. It is about doing maintenance. It is about patching. It is upgrades and stuff. I think the power of cloud is that it frees up IT resources by outsourcing to a trusted, reliable, low-cost provider, enabling seamless innovation in a way that then frees up resources for them to do more value-added activities to really drive business values.