Devnet Cloud View & Web Industry News

Craig Deveson CEO of Devnet congratulates the team at Google on the development of GAPE. Google Apps has been in the market 3 years compared with Microsoft BPOS only 1 year. In Cloud Computing that is a large technical lead but it is always difficult to dislodge existing companies especially one’s with the marketing budget of Microsoft.

According to a recent article in eWeek – Feb 22 2010

“Google finds itself in a daunting position on Feb. 22, the third birthday of Google Apps Premier Edition. The company is trying to dislodge legacy on-premises installations from Microsoft and IBM while fighting off SAAS solutions from those same companies. It also has to compete with new cloud offerings from Cisco Systems, as well as from a slew of startups such as Zoho, MindTouch and others. But Google, Microsoft and IBM will be the main protagonists in the battle for pre-eminence in the market for cloud, or Web-based, collaboration software.
When Google launched its Google Apps Premier Edition to the market three years ago, it marked a bold bet on the future of collaboration software “

The collaboration software market was, and still is, ruled by Microsoft and IBM, which boast more than 650 million customers for their respective Microsoft Office, SharePoint and IBM Lotus suite combined. Microsoft and IBM also license these suites as “on-premises” software that customers install and maintain on their own servers.

Google’s launch of GAPE was a departure from this on-premises model, offering collaboration software hosted on Google’s servers and delivered via the Web in a method that has become known as cloud computing.

Google Enterprise President Dave Girouard said that while Google spent 2007 and 2008 arguing the benefits of the cloud, Microsoft and IBM helped validate the market with their products.

“We now have all major competitors in our industry in full agreement that the cloud is worth going to,” Girouard said. “We view this as a good thing. If you have all of the major vendors suggesting you look at the cloud, the consideration of our solutions is going to rise dramatically.”

Girouard believes it is the only “fluent, native speaker in the cloud” and that Microsoft and IBM came into its jungle. “We think we’re several years ahead of any of them.”