Tag Archives: Google

Google Apps – Innovation in Review


Yesterday evening I was on a webex presented by the Google Apps product team, and it really brought home to me how the transition to Cloud Computing is going to change the way that businesses use technology.  For those of you that have read “Who moved my cheese?” you will know that there are a number of ways of dealing with change – and my experience of Cloud shows me a common reaction is to dig in the heels, decide not to understand the full capabilities of the new technology and create a number of reasons as to why it “would never be right for our business.”

However, when you start look at the issue from the other side, and think “how could my business work better by leveraging these technologies” then I think the positives outweigh any concerns pretty quickly.  Accept change, and work out how you can benefit before Mr. Competitor does.  It’s very rare that your IT Budget actually differentiates you from the competition – and this is one of those times.

Constant Innovation by Google

Constant Innovation

The presentation was called Innovation in Review, and ran through highlights of new releases over the past 12 months.  You have to put this in context with the traditional way of buying business software – spend a long time deciding, take the leap, spend a lot of money, customise and install, sweat the asset, look at new version, spend a long time deciding etc etc.  How many businesses are on the latest version of Exchange?  How many users are on the latest version of Office?

The new paradigm is Constant Innovation.  Every day new cloud products are released, and all your users need to do to get them is refresh their browser.

Google have made over 100 such improvements over the past year, and that means the clients that signed up to Google Apps didn’t have to spend a long time deciding when to take a ‘snapshot’ and make their purchase.  As long as they believed in the Cloud concept they could make their purchase and await a long line of constant innovation helping their business to work better.

A great example from the consumer world would be the iPad.  I’ve leapt straight in because I think the evolution of this form factor is going to define the next ten years of personal computing.  As I type this post on my iMac I look down at the keypad and think – in a few years we’ll laugh about the “Key Pad”

But many of my work colleagues are saying “I’ll wait until the next version – it’s bound to be better.”  Imagine buying an iPad now and when they release the next version in 6 months they send you a new one via UPS.  Welcome to Cloud Computing!

The presentation will be available online shortly and I will post the link when I get it.  Just to give you an idea of some of the changes that have arrived over the past few months:

Drag and Drop attachments – you can now drag an attachment from your Windows Explorer or Mac Finder into your Gmail window and automatically attach it – saving time.

Drag and Drop photos – you can drag an image from your desktop or folder and drop it right into your email, much easier than copying and pasting.

Inserting Invitations into an email – instead of having to send a separate Calendar invite, you can open up an invite within your existing email chain in Gmail.

Gmail search has been improved – if you don’t have Gmail it is hard to explain how easy it is to find an email that was sent a while back.  What is a .pst file again?!

Forgotten Attachment Detector – how many times have you received an email back “Nothing attached?” Now Gmail spots this and warns you.  Little touches that save time and make you more professional.

2 Way Calendar Sync for Blackberry – keeping you on top of things on the road.

Upload any file to Docs - The mythical G-Drive, you can now upload any doc format and share them with your contacts – photos, PDF’s, CAD files.  Docs now becomes your storage and DR tool.  You can use a range of third party apps to sync with your local folders if you need.

Character by Character collaboration – you can now have up to 50 concurrent editors on a single document.  Imagine a multi national team putting together your annual budget.  No more sending around “Budget_Kathy_Version2″ and trying to get everything into one final document.  Let everyone work together on the same document at the same time.

IM and Presence within Docs – You can now communicate with your collaborators in real time “John, why not change cell C6 to include the new equipment we’re buying?”  Your teams are now working together and improving productivity.

Improved Sharing Settings – Admins and Users now have much greater control over sharing.  The default is private, but you can punch holes through this – you could make your new Product Datasheet public within your domain, so that users could search within their Google Docs interface and up it pops at the speed of lightning.  This is file sharing for the future.

Google Apps Scripts – These enable businesses to create simple scripts for running repetitive tasks saving them time.  Perhaps it is approving holidays, perhaps it is approving purchases of new equipment.  Apps Scripts hives you simple tools to trigger them from any website and can now link into MySQL databases.

Google Wave - Whilst this is still in Labs (Beta), Wave is now available in Google Apps if you wish.  It works really well for small teams collaborating on tasks – perhaps putting a meeting agenda together.

Reset Sign-In Cookies – One of the favourite objections to Cloud is “What about the security of my data?”  Yes, tell me about that laptop you left on the train with all your documents on the hard drive?  The Cloud gives you security you could never get with local storage.  And now Google have a Reset Sign-In Cookie feature so if Bob has lost his laptop, a quick reset and the thief cannot get into the Google Apps account.

Mobile Security – Admins can now enforce security policies on mobile devices, in terms of the complexity of the password and the length.  Google have many more features coming here apparently – secure mobile access is a big focus.  I’m not sure how Blackberry’s and BES features in all this if you can securely access Google Apps from any smart phone.

Migration Tools – Google have migrated over 2 billion emails into Gmail.  Some clients prefer to start afresh, but if you want to transfer your legacy data in then there are migration tools for Outlook, Lotus Notes and Exchange.  They make it extremely simple to migrate and users can be ready to go on Monday morning with all their existing email (which they can now search properly for the first time).

All Google Apps coming to Google Apps – that might not appear to make sense, but all the consumer Google Apps that you love, like Reader, Blogger, YouTube are shortly coming to your Business Google Apps account, so you can access them in one place.  A great result for those who have had issues logging in and out.

Those innovations wrapped up the call.   I’m confident that as businesses start to look at change in a positive light and weigh up this rate of innovation, versus the static Exchange 2003 investment they made, that this has to be the right business decision moving forward.  Yes you might lose your watermark’s in Word, yes you might lose an obscure formula in Excel – but this is a new way of working and I for one am excited to be on the journey with them.

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Google Apps – the marmite of Reseller Programmes?


Last week I attended Channel Expo at Olympia in London.  Being a great believer in the power of the internet as the new tool for researching anything I have to say I wasn’t surprised by how empty the whole event seemed.  Whilst this was the first time I had attended I understand that the event is around half the size it used to be only a few years ago when it was held at the NEC in Birmingham.

I had assumed that when industry heavy-weights like Google or VM-Ware came to speak that it would be standing room only but it was not the case – with perhaps 10 people in each session.  Great for me though as I felt I was getting a one-to-one experience.

Google Apps Reseller Programme

Are IT Providers ready to embrace the Cloud?

I’m a great believer in the future of the Cloud and it was Google particularly that interested me.  Humans are naturally very reluctant to look at things in a new way.

In one Google webinar they talk of how the first cars were called Horseless Carriages because people still couldn’t define them in a new context.

I agree with Google that many of us are still looking at Cloud Computing, and SaaS through a similar lens and have yet to define the market in new terms.

Forget how things are done today and think what you could do if you started from scratch in the cloud.  I touched on this in my previous post – Intelligent SaaS -Is your vendor making things 10 times better? The problem that Microsoft and all the traditional vendors have is that they are trying to SaaS-ify their existing technology – building horseless carriages, and not building cars.

The Google presentation I watched was by Peter Lorant, head of EMEA Channel Partners for Google Enterprise.  As a cloud evangelist I was very interested to see the opportunities that are out there for resellers.  Google are focused on delivering innovative new products and they rely on the channel to implement them and manage the customers.

The Google Apps package retails at £33 per user per year, and the reseller makes 20% of this, owning the billing relationship with the client, so the opportunity to make more or less is there.

Peter alluded to the Long Tail that exists in their channel – that of the thousands of partners that sign up, very few are making a successful business out of it.  Now this is not a Google phenomenon – in all of the businesses I have worked I have experienced a 90:10 rule, where 10% of the partners deliver 90% of the business.  I suspect that with Google it might be even more extreme.  It seems to me as if the Google Apps Reseller Programme has the marmite effect, you either love it or hate it.

I believe this might be because the IT Channel is heavily reliant on their existing revenues – whether this be one off project work related to applications, the infrastructure and the security around them, or break-fix of the installed kit.  Whilst Google are very clear about the additional revenue streams around consulting, end user training and ongoing management that Cloud provides, it is my belief that at the end of the day many people prefer to sell what they know.  Many would prefer to adopt a wait and see attitude – “I’m keeping my head above water so let’s not rock the boat.”

My concern for the channel would be that we experienced this in managed Email Security in the early 2000′s where IT Providers would prefer to stick with traditional reactive software based Anti-Virus and Anti-Spam, and that meant when it didn’t work clients would come directly to the vendor.

I think Google have got a long way to go to convince the IT Channel that they should give up their core business and transfer to this new model, but their constant investment and innovation in Google Apps requires us to keep an eye on them.  When your client wants to “Go Google” you want to make sure they “Go Google” with you.

Are you a Google Apps reseller?  What has your experience been so far?  Are you anti-Google and unconvinced of the Apps model?  Does it make business sense for you to transfer to their recurring revenue model?

I appreciate your thoughts.

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Would you buy from your own website? 19 lessons we can learn from Amazon.


Amazon logoGoogle’s latest financial reports show a turnover of $23.6 billion.  The vast majority of this is generated from their search business – helping millions of searchers find the right site, and helping millions of businesses get found.  I am continually surprised however by what happens next.  What is it that the searcher finds, and what does the business do now they have been found?

The buying process has changed dramatically  in recent years as a result of the internet’s development.  Pre-internet consumers were passive and relied on expensive advertising budgets to advise them of what they wanted, and where they could get it.

Nowadays, if you think of some of your recent purchases, consumers are active participants and start the process by launching their browser and researching the market.  What product do I want (a camcorder), what model do I want (a Panasonic SDR-S26), where can I get it for the best price (Amazon).  Whilst this an end-to-end online purchase, even requirements as diverse as a house purchase, university selection, or a choice of Child Trust Funds would all now start online.

I spend most of my time working with SMB’s.  These might be clients, or IT Partners that I work with.  When I discuss marketing and websites the response is usually “We get most of our clients from referrals” or “We don’t have time/money/resource for marketing.”  Both of these are excuses, and seem crazy to me in light of what we have just discussed about today’s buying behaviour.

If I have just set up a business in Leeds and I need an IT Provider, then the first thing I am going to do is type in “IT Consultant Leeds” into Google.  Here’s my advice – as an IT Provider you need to make sure that firstly you are on the front page through a combination of SEO and paid advertising, and then make sure that your prospect likes what they see when they get to your site and that everything on it drives them towards a sale.

Shopping on Amazon

Would you buy from your own Website?

I recently bought a book at Amazon, and counted up all the sales techniques they employ on a single product page.  Even as an Amazon advocate I was surprised to get to 19 and I think it gives us a good insight into what is possible when a Company really wants to secure business.

Take a look at How They Got Started on Amazon and look for these 19 sales techniques that help make sure you have all the information you need to make a purchase then and there.  In brackets my notes suggest how these techniques might be adapted for your own business.

  1. Look Inside (free trial)
  2. Customer Reviews (Case Studies)
  3. Saving from List Price (Why should you should buy from me)
  4. Delivery times (I can solve your problem quickly)
  5. Express Delivery (very quickly)
  6. Other options (Hardback/Used)
  7. Frequently bought together (bundled pricing/upsell)
  8. Customers also bought (cross-sell)
  9. Amazon sales rank (How popular is this item amongst it’s peers)
  10. Detailed Product Description (I want to make sure you have everything you need to make a decision)
  11. Tags (Help customers to locate product)
  12. Rate this item (If you aren’t happy you can let others know and they can let you know)
  13. What do customers ultimately buy after viewing this item? (Perhaps you really want this….)
  14. Most helpful reviews (reviewing the reviewers!)
  15. Customer discussion forum (Meet like-minded customers to discuss products)
  16. Listmania (See lists of similar products that others have made)
  17. Similar items by category (More upsell)
  18. Similar items by subject (and More upsell)
  19. Feedback (How well have we listed this product)

Amazon’s primary objective is to sell books, but you don’t just go to Amazon for the wide range they stock.  You shop there because they have turned their entire business into the product.   IT Providers are in the IT industry and should be leading the way here by developing websites and marketing strategies that drive high value recurring revenue contracts into their business.

Not every IT Provider will be able to use every example.  But think about your prospect opening up their browser tomorrow morning as they start to look for your Services and ask “Would I buy from my own website?”