Google chat now does video!

The pace of Google’s innovation can sometimes makes your head spin.  In a little over a day, they released a major upgrade to Gtalk (instant messaging) to over 35+ million users.  I don’t think I’d even call it an upgrade -  the difference between a chat program and full audio/video conference application doesn’t really fit my definition of an “upgrade”.  For those that haven’t started using it already, see the details below.  The audio and video performance is very good.

Since sometimes reading “lol” doesn’t deliver the same punch as actually hearing your friend laugh at your jokes, you can now use voice and video capabilities in your Gmail chat. From within Gmail, you can have an actual conversation with someone (seriously, out loud), or even chat face to face over video.

Here’s what you’ll need to get started:

• • Download the Gmail voice and video chat plug-in, quit all open browser windows, and install the plug-in.
  • Sign in to Gmail.
  • In the Chat section of your Gmail, select the contact you want to call. If they have a camera icon next to their name, you can make a voice or video call to them; just click Video & more

If your friend doesn’t have a camera next to their name in your chat list, you can invite them to download the Gmail voice and video chat plug-in from the Video & more menu in a chat window. Even if your friend doesn’t have a video camera, you can still make a voice call or a 1-way video call.

As someone who has spent hundreds, if not thousands, of hours helping large enterprises transition to the latest and greatest collaboration and messaging tools, I’m constantly impressed with the way the Google builds and implements products.  But enough about infrastructure; it’s not nearly as cool as the end results.  See the screen shots below.

Google and uptime

For a relatively small outage that Google had a few months ago, they sure did get a lot of press.  As Google responded, “Over 1 million business customers” have come to expect 100% up-time and flawless service from Google, so I guess it should not have been a surprise that blogosphere lit up during this interruption.  It certainly set the stage to for a great discussion around up-time and reliability.  

Let’s take a deeper look at the reality of what Google provides; the chart below from the Radicati Group documents average downtime as experienced by business for several enterprise messaging systems on a monthly basis.  It’s clear that the traditional on-premise approach is at least an order of magnitude less reliable than Gmail.   

I am not one to be swayed by reports & averages, and real world experience trumps any marketing hype or consultants research, in my opinion.  In this light, we setup our own enterprise monitoring solution that tracks Google on a regular basis.  

The charts below are from monitoring our own internal Google Apps Gmail over the last few months. Keep in mind, this is actual production data, not just a simple “ping” of gmail.com.  These results are based on successful log-in actions via an automated script, performed every minute from no less than 12 internationally dispersed servers that intelligently check for full Gmail availability.  

 

If you look at things in even more detail, you can see that not only is Google delivering on the SLA, they provide a great user experience.  See the response time graph below; this is the amount of time that it takes for the login process to occur.  Google is providing sub-second response time over this entire same period.  How long does it take you to login to your current on-premise mail system?

 

Security in the Cloud

Customers are sometimes apprehensive about moving to Cloud Computing, and they often express this hesitation as being “concerned about security” or “worried about data privacy”.  Oddly enough, if you ask, most of them will also to tell you how great online banking is and how they couldn’t live without it.

They might also mention how many laptops have been stolen or lost in the last year.  Let’s face facts; people who want your data would rather steal the laptop of a Product Manager or Sales Director to have all of the contacts, emails, and documents locally than spend all the time and effort to hack firewalls, crack passwords and then cover their tracks.  Does your company have encrypted PSTs or My Documents folders on laptops?

Now let’s contrast this situation with Cloud based email at Google.  If my laptop is stolen, the thief gets nothing.  There’s no data stored locally on my machine.  Google even takes things a few steps further to ensure security and privacy.  

At the bottom of every Google Mail page, you will notice a button called “Activity”.  If you click on it, it displays not only the address of all the recent connections to your mail but also the method (imap, browser, etc…).  Even more, with Google Apps, you can automatically enforce SSL encryption at the domain level.   

Need more security?  How about the fact that Google Apps includes Postini Message Security and Discovery at no additional cost.  This includes spam control, anti-virus protection, and message filtering.  Need still more?  With Google’s support for Single-Sign-On, we can implement multi-factor authentication which means that even if a password is compromised, additional private information is required to access the account.  

In reality, Cloud computing provides better security in a quicker and efficient way.  If you too have “security concerns”, we would love to talk with about how to improve your controls, while reducing costs.  To set up a demo or just get started with a trial deployment, contact Eran at 404-665-3132 or email sales@cloudsherpas.com.

How much is your “my documents” folder worth?

Personal computing definitely changed the way we all use technology, and a by-product of this revolution has been that we all keep our stuff locally on our computers. That’s the “personal” in PC, after all.

I know that many of you will remind me how you diligently store all of your documents on the corporate file server, and the system administrators will elaborate on scripts mapping users’ “my documents” back to network share or use an off-line/folder sync solution.

The reality is that many users (i.e. folks like consultants and sales reps that travel and are out of the office regularly) don’t ever get the important files on to the corporate servers. External drive manufactures picked up on this right away; they put “One-Touch” buttons on USB drives that allow you to do a “complete backup with the touch of a button”. In my world, that’s still too much to remember, and even once I remember to do it, it takes a long time and slows down the machine. I can’t remember the last time that I was ever able to recover a useful file from a USB drive.

Enter Mozy Enterprise. Last night, I needed a customer presentation that I’d left on my laptop back in the office. Since Mozy is service that runs in the background on your PC, it had already backed-up the file to EMC’s data center, and I was able to login to the website and retrieve it, even though my machine was off. I know that even if my laptop died or was stolen today, I would have all the important stuff that I need without any effort on my part.

Mozy Enterprise is a perfect fit for business that need an easy and managed solution to keep remote offices and road warriors protected. It comes with full-featured web-based console that let’s IT departments specify backup policies, configuration settings, and recover files, all using SSL and AES encryption. All this costs about the same as a new pair of tennis shoes. How valuable are your documents?

If you are interested in learning more, setting up a demo, or just getting starting with a trial deployment, contact Eran at 404-665-3132 or email sales@cloudsherpas.com.

Searching in Google Chrome

One of the coolest features of Google’s new browser (aside from the wickedly fast javascript engine called V-8) is the Omni box. What makes it useful is that you can search for anything and everything from one place.

Are you a little in the dark about where the Omni box is? Well, its better know as the address bar. Yes, in the same place that you would normally type “www.mysite.com”, is where you can also just type in text as if you where on the Google search page. Too easy.

Not content to leave things well enough alone, Google added the ability to customize the engines that are processing your searches; this means that if you have other places that you frequently search, like wikipedia or even Google Docs, you can easily add these engines to the default list. Here’s how:

Right Click in the address bar and select Edit Search Engines and on the next window select Add. You need to give your custom search engine a name and keyword. On the URL box, paste in one of the URLs listed below. Now when you search, these results will be included in the list. How simple was that? Feel free to post a comment

Wikipedia - URL:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=%s

Google Images - URL:
http://images.google.com/images?gbv=2&hl=en&q=%s&btnG=Search+Images

Google Maps - URL:
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&q=%s

Digg.com - URL:
http://digg.com/search?s=%s

Google Apps newest member?

Welcome, Google Video.

With all the excitement around the release of my new favorite browser, Chrome, Google also managed to expand the growing suite of Apps last week to include Video. The primary use cases are still developing, however, product training seems to be an obvious fit.

What you get

With Google Apps, Premier Edition, you now get Google Video included at no additional cost. Each clip can be up to 300MB in size, and you get 3 GB of video storage per user account. Administrators have a variety of controls over the service, such as being able to edit or remove clips, generate usage reports and create tag taxonomies. Here are some suggestions to get you started:

1. Share rich video information – Video sharing makes important communications like internal trainings and corporate announcements more personal, engaging and effective.
2. Keep videos secure and private – Employees can securely share videos with select coworkers or everyone at the company without making confidential information public.
3. No large files or complex infrastructure – Google securely hosts and streams your videos, so employees don’t need to share videos over email, or burden IT for a video solution.
4. Everyone at your company can contribute – Employees can share videos instantly. Viewing and annotating doesn’t require any special software, just a standard browser.

Google releases ‘Chrome’ browser

 

Web 2.0, refined.

As it turns out, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and even Mozilla’s Firefox were never built to be traditional application platforms.  They have provided a useful way to surf links and store bookmarks, but that’s about it.  Think about the last great or even signifiant innovation to come from either; tabbed browsing?  plugin support?

Well, once again, Google re-wrote the book today.  They’ve released an open source browser that brings incredible business value to the cloud.  Here’s what they have to say about their newest project, the Google Chrome Browser.  Why not try it right now -> http://www.google.com/chrome  

At Google, we spend much of our time working inside a browser. We search, chat, email and collaborate in a browser. And like all of you, in our spare time, we shop, bank, read news and keep in touch with friends - all using a browser. People are spending an increasing amount of time online, and they’re doing things never imagined when the web first appeared about 15 years ago.

Since we spend so much time online, we began seriously thinking about what kind of browser could exist if you started from scratch and built on the best elements out there. We realized that the web had evolved from mainly simple text pages to rich, interactive applications and that we needed to completely rethink the browser. What we really needed was not just a browser, but also a modern platform for web pages and applications, and that’s what we set out to build.

So today we’re releasing the beta version of a new open source browser: Google Chrome.

On the surface, we designed a browser window that is streamlined and simple. To most people, it isn’t the browser that matters. It’s only a tool to run the important stuff - the pages, sites and applications that make up the web. Like the classic Google homepage, Google Chrome is clean and fast. It gets out of your way and gets you where you want to go.

Under the hood, we were able to build the foundation of a browser that runs today’s complex web applications much better . By keeping each tab in an isolated “sandbox”, we were able to prevent one tab from crashing another and provide improved protection from rogue sites. We improved speed and responsiveness across the board. We also built V8, a more powerful JavaScript engine, to power the next generation of web applications that aren’t even possible in today’s browsers.

This is just the beginning - Google Chrome is far from done. We’ve released this beta for Windows to start the broader discussion and hear from you as quickly as possible. We’re hard at work building versions for Mac and Linux too, and we’ll continue to make it even faster and more robust.

We owe a great debt to many open source projects, and we’re committed to continuing on their path. We’ve used components from Apple’s WebKit and Mozilla’s Firefox, among others - and in that spirit, we are making all of our code open source as well. We hope to collaborate with the entire community to help drive the web forward.

The web gets better with more options and innovation. Google Chrome is another option, and we hope it contributes to making the web even better.

But enough from us. The best test of Google Chrome is to try it yourself.

Are Enterprises Ready for Cloud Computing?

The Darwinian Theory of the Corporate Datacenter (or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Cloud)

By: Barry Lynn
Aug. 15, 2008 09:00 AM

There have been multiple white papers and articles written by analysts - Is Cloud Computing Ready for the Enterprise? The question is asked so many times now - Is Cloud Computing ready for the enterprise? So, I have to ask - Is the enterprise ready for Cloud Computing?

I’ll start this discourse with a few PC and sincere comments (the two are not mutually exclusive unless one is running for political office).

First, I love Corporate CIOs and IT managers (not in a romantic way, of course, but with great admiration).

Second, they have the most difficult jobs in the corporate universe. They are the brains and the central nervous systems of large enterprises. They are also the most taken for granted of all executives. They represent cost centers who get no credit for their corporations’ profits, while keeping the corporation alive. If they achieve 99.99% availability of their services, an iota of kudos is given for that 99.99%, but a mountain of wrath is doled out for the other 0.01%.

Finally, I spent 27 of my 37 year career in information technology as an enterprise IT manager and Fortune 500 CIO. You guys and gals are my comrades.

So, why do I feel the need to put my comrades on a pedestal? Well, it started with some comments I made at a Wall Street conference and variations of it that I made to members of the technical press and analyst community. I used the following analogy.

If you woke up in the morning and read in the Wall Street Journal that an eCommerce company like Overstock.com had stopped using the USPS, UPS, FedEx, DHL, etc. to deliver their goods and, instead, leased airport hubs all over the world, bought a fleet of jets and bought thousands of trucks and started delivering the stuff themselves, you’d think they were out of their minds. So, why is is not equally insane for financial services companies, health care institutions, manufacturing companies, bio-tech companies, pharmaceutical giants, etc. to be spending a billion dollars or much more each year on information technology infrastructure?

Well, that analogy has prompted several to accuse me of thinking that corporations are insane and corporate IT managers and CIOs are stupid. I assure you that it not the case.

Then what do I do? I really put my foot in my mouth. I title this treatise “Are Enterprises Ready for Cloud Computing?”, as if to arrogantly proclaim that we are ready but enterprises are not.

But there is expiation for that as well (and I am not running for office, so this is a thought embellishment rather than flip flop).

Intellectually, of course you are ready. Of course you have the experience and skill to adopt Cloud Computing. And most of you have the resources. Most significantly, you have always risen to the occasion when disruptive technologies have been thrust upon you.

But, practically speaking, whether you, I or anyone thinks that the future holds a world where all enterprises will get computing on demand and only pay for what they consume, we know that this will not happen over night. I do see a world, though, in six or seven years, where this will be very much the norm and corporations owning datacenters will be the exception to the rule.

So, here’s where the Darwinian Theory of the Corporate Datacenter comes to play.

I have said many times that Cloud Computing is the most disruptive technology that has come along in a very long time. Respected technology analysts say it will be bigger than e-Business and it’s potentially a quarter of a trillion dollar market (that’s almost enough to fund a fraction of a war!). So, people ask me - Do you think Cloud Computing is a revolution or an evolution?

My answer is a resounding “Both”.

I believe that all evolutionary change starts with revolutionary change. In Darwin’s Origin of the Species evolutionary changes start with a mutation. Those mutations are the revolutions that result in evolution. In most cases the mutation comes about as a mechanism to heighten the chance of survival - you know, to make the species more fit. Subsequent to those revolutions, the evolutionary process gradually occurs as the most fit survive and the mutation becomes the norm - the standard.

Cloud computing is the mutation - the revolution. Enterprise IT and Corporate CIOs/IT Managers will jump on the opportunity to evolve as they always have when revolutionary technology mutations have occurred.

So, here’s an example of a scenario of how the evolution will happen.

During the next couple of years two things will occur.

First, enterprises know that the hardest things to plan for with regard to capacity, performance, etc., are on line applications offered on the web. They really have no control over who may log on, how many may log on, when they may log on, what they may do once they log on, etc. So, the natural evolutionary step to mitigate this is to run those applications on massively scalable infrastructure that scales up and down dynamically as needed, using resources on demand, always there when needed and only paying for what is consumed. These infrastructures are what we are now calling Clouds.

At the same time, the mission critical data and systems of records that are the enterprise life blood residing in their datacenters need to be isolated from these on line applicatons exposed to every internet user. This will be accomplished through the use of secure virtual gateways in the Cloud, connecting, in a loosely coupled manner, rather than a fully integrated manner, to the enterprise datacenters, their databases and systems of record.

These gateways will take many forms. They may be SOA gateways using XML and virtual XML firewalls, virtual messaging systems such as MQ, virtual EAI appliances or customized appliances encapsulating organizations’ proprietary techniques for reliably and securely communicating among systems (and anything new that comes along to supplement or replace these things).

Second, infrastructure/architecture agnostic Cloud platforms (what we at 3tera call Cloud Computing Without Compromise) will be installed in enterprise datacenters. There will be two factors that will drive this.

(1) As more and more apps are offered on line, those same apps will often be used internally by the enterprise employees. Why incur the cost of having separate experiences for employees and customers who are accessing the same information and functionality. Also, when connecting the on line apps in the Cloud to the datacenter and SORs, having them on similar platforms will make it seamless and efficient. ‘

(2) A Cloud infrastructure done right, behind the corporate firewall, enables the enterprise to run their datacenters as metered utilities. It enables them to more efficiently use their hardware resources by provisioning what is needed for each application on demand and releasing those resources when no longer needed for other applications to use. It enables them to more efficiently use intellectual capital by shifting IT administrators from managing machines to managing applications. And, most importantly, it greatly decreases time to market because the lengthy provisioning, configuring, etc., of hardware and infrastructure resources is, pardon the pun, virtually eliminated. So albeit humongously significant, forget all the talk about cost reduction and avoidance. Cloud Computing in the enterprise has the potential to greatly increase revenue and beat the heck out of competitors implementing like products using traditional datacenter deployment methods.

OK - so what’s the next step in the evolution?

At the same time that enterprises are growing comfy with apps in Clouds and realizing the upside of dynamic provisioning and scaling, they will be developing new applications and replacing/changing existing ones. They will start building the new apps in Clouds and as they change existing apps, will consider migrating them to the Cloud in the process. This will afford them the advantages of much faster times to market, the ability to run applications on demand in multiple datacenters (globally if appropriate) creating their first truly complete disaster recovery abilities and concentrate on their core businesses which may be financial services, health care, manufacturing, etc., but certainly is not datacenter operations (they will leave that to the companies whose core business IS datacenter operations).

Now the final step (well, as my limited vision can see it - of course there will be much more beyond this):

Enterprises will find themselves with datacenters that only contain data. Finally, a datacenter will be what its name implies. All of their functionality - all the non-data tiers of their services, will be in Clouds connected to the datacenters’ data. At that point, evolution will have to start behaving like the datacenter is an appendage. Over time, the corporate data will move to the Cloud just as many smaller businesses without datacenters are using storage services in Clouds today. The corporate datacenter will be a vestige, and eventually evolution will cause it to disappear.

Discussion of this step always raises questions of privacy and security. I maintain that when corporate data is in the Cloud it will actually be more protected than it is in the enterprise datacenter. But I’ll save that for a separate, devoted future posting.

In short, the corporate datacenter is not a stupid useless entity. There have been no alternatives. My hat is off to the brave men and women who devote their careers to thanklessly operating them. They are profound necessities. But neccesity truly is the mother of invention, and the corporate datacenter, with all of its overhead, has bred Cloud Computing.

So, as I started this with a PC comment, I feel like ending it with one. As I composed this, I did realize that there are many people out there that discount Darwinian evolution in favor of Creationism. I assure you that I have the utmost respect for all beliefs, no matter how different from my own. And my references to evolution here, obviously have to do with the evolution of technology, not of the human race. Furthermore, I am very happy to depict the corporate datacenter as the eventual dinosaur with a saddle on it’s back being ridden by a member of the Cloud Computing species.

Google to get aggressive with Apps suite

The company will continue to add new apps to its hosted software suite, but the price will stay the same

By Juan Carlos Perez, IDG News Service

August 05, 2008

Google plans to aggressively add new applications and capabilities to its Web-hosted Apps software suite for businesses and will likely leave the price unchanged as it builds out the service, a company official said Tuesday.

The comments signal a move that will likely heat up the competitive fire between Google and Microsoft in the market for office productivity, communication, and collaboration software.

Google, a recent entrant to this market, has opted to provide its suite via a SaaS (software as a service) model, a newly popular approach in which vendors host the software and data, and deliver it to customers via the Internet.

Microsoft, a longtime player with its ubiquitous Office suite and Outlook/Exchange messaging and collaboration platform, is starting to react to this trend, although its software is still primarily designed to be installed on customers’ own servers.

Currently, Google offers a free, ad-supported Apps version designed for individuals and very small businesses, and a fee-based version called Premier that is aimed at companies of all sizes and costs $50 per user per year. That is considered an aggressive price versus the cost of comparable Microsoft software.

Although the individual and business versions share the same core applications, such as Gmail, word processor, calendar, spreadsheet, and presentation programs, Apps Premier has a variety of IT management tools as well as APIs for integration with other software.

“Our intention is to really put more value at that price point and offer some amazing proposition to companies,” said Dave Girouard, president of Google’s Enterprise unit, at the Pacific Crest Technology Leadership Forum.

While not ruling out adding other pricing tiers for certain technology, Girouard stressed that the current strategy is focused on increasing the user base by making the suite more attractive without increasing its cost.

“We expect to hold the price point and add more and more value at that price point,” he said. “We want to have commercial relationships with lots of companies, and it matters more that we have that than exactly how much dollar per user we’re getting.”

“We can certainly hold that price point. We can continue to put more capabilities there. The cost of an additional application to us is tiny, it’s hardly material. There are certainly types of applications that we could add that would add cost and we would price appropriately, but I don’t expect the price to climb. That wouldn’t be my expectation,” he added.

Girouard didn’t provide any specifics about the types of applications or new features Google is planning to add to Apps.

More than 500,000 businesses and universities have signed up for the free and fee-based versions of Google Apps, resulting in about 10 million active users of the suite, Girouard said.

Apps Premier customers don’t generally object to the suite’s subscription price, he said, adding that their most common concerns before adopting it are about the security of hosting the software and data outside their premises, and about Google’s future plans for the product.

He said Google isn’t trying to provide all the features in, say, Microsoft Office, in which applications are generally considered to be richer in functionality. Instead, Google focuses on what it thinks Apps can do better, like simplifying collaboration and sharing in workgroups. As hosted software, Apps is designed with collaboration in mind.

“I’d like all the holes [in the feature set] to be filled, but I’ll say generally we’re not in the model of trying to replicate the products that work really well for what they do,” he said.

For example, Google’s spreadsheet application today isn’t designed to win over financial analysts who spend a lot of time building very complicated models in Microsoft Excel.

“Excel is very good at that. [But] there’s a million things you can use our spreadsheet product for that we think we’re much better than Excel at,” he said. “If you’re looking for feature parity, you’ll probably never see that.”

How Cloud Computing is Changing the World

A major shift in the way companies obtain software and computing capacity is under way as more companies tap into Web-based applications

by Rachael King

At first, just a handful of employees at Sanmina-SCI (SANM) began using Google Apps (GOOG) for tasks like e-mail, document creation, and appointment scheduling. Now, just six months later, almost 1,000 employees of the electronics manufacturing company go online to use Google Apps in place of the comparable Microsoft (MSFT) tools. “We have project teams working on a global basis and to help them collaborate effectively, we use Google Apps,” says Manesh Patel, chief information officer of Sanmina-SCI, a company with $10.7 billion in annual revenue. In the next three years, the number of Google Apps users may rise to 10,000, or about 25% of the total, Patel estimates.

San Jose (Calif.)-based Sanmina and Google are at the forefront of a fundamental shift in the way companies obtain software and computing capacity. A host of providers including Amazon (AMZN), Salesforce.com (CRM), IBM (IBM), Oracle (ORCL), and Microsoft are helping corporate clients use the Internet to tap into everything from extra server space to software that helps manage customer relationships. Assigning these computing tasks to some remote location—rather than, say, a desktop computer, handheld machine, or a company’s own servers—is referred to collectively as cloud computing (BusinessWeek, 4/24/08), and it’s catching on across Corporate America.

The term “cloud computing” encompasses many areas of tech, including software as a service, a software distribution method pioneered by Salesforce.com about a decade ago. It also includes newer avenues such as hardware as a service, a way to order storage and server capacity on demand from Amazon and others. What all these cloud computing services have in common, though, is that they’re all delivered over the Internet, on demand, from massive data centers.

A Sea Change in Computing

Some analysts say cloud computing represents a sea change in the way computing is done in corporations. Merrill Lynch (MER) estimates that within the next five years, the annual global market for cloud computing will surge to $95 billion. In a May 2008 report, Merrill Lynch estimated that 12% of the worldwide software market would go to the cloud in that period.

Those vendors that can adjust their product lines to meet the needs of large cloud computing providers stand to profit. Companies like IBM, Dell (DELL), and Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), for instance, are moving aggressively in this direction. On Aug. 1, IBM said it would spend $360 million to build a cloud computing data center in Research Triangle Park, N.C., bringing to nine its total of cloud computing centers worldwide. Dell is also targeting this market. The computer marker supplies products to some of the largest cloud computing providers and Web 2.0 companies, including Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, and Yahoo (YHOO). “We created a whole new business just to build custom products for those customers,” Dell CEO Michael Dell says. “Now it’s a several-hundred-million-dollar business, and it will be a billion-dollar business in a couple of years—it’s on a tear.”

One of those customers, Microsoft, has made cloud computing one of five priorities for fiscal 2009, according to a recent memo from CEO Steve Ballmer. Microsoft’s version of cloud computing, Software-plus-Services, is designed to let customers choose whether they want traditional software, software services, or a combination of the two. In the memo, Ballmer promised that employees would hear more about the company’s cloud computing platform initiatives in the next version of its Live and Online technologies, scheduled to be unveiled in October. About 9% of IT managers who responded in a Goldman Sachs (GS) survey said they planned to use Microsoft for software services this year in addition to those they already use.

Reliability Is a Concern

Many chief information officers remain concerned about the reliability and security of cloud-based services. Events like the six-hour outage on July 20 of Amazon’s S3 service, designed for developers who want easy access to storage over the Internet, give CIOs reason for pause. “It’s hard to turn a big ship very quickly,” says Daryl Plummer, managing vice-president of consulting firm Gartner (IT). “You have technologies that are like cement in these businesses—they’re hard to change and get rid of.” Plummer says that about $8 out of every $10 spent on technology in corporations is for maintaining systems, rather than innovating.

At Sanmina, spurring innovation is one of the main motivations for investment in Google Apps, Patel says. “One of our strategies to be competitive on a global basis is to be innovative in terms of how we work with our different teams, with our customers, and our suppliers,” he says, adding that his company operates in an extremely competitive industry. The price doesn’t hurt, either. The enterprise version of Google Apps costs $50 per user per year, while a license of Microsoft Office Professional retails for $499.99. True, Google Apps lacks some of Office’s features. But Google Apps compensates in that it’s more adept at fostering collaboration among employees scattered across the globe, Patel says. “We see [cloud computing] as a very compelling proposition in the long term,” he says.

As appealing as the prospect of cloud computing may be, many CIOs, analysts, and even vendors themselves, see it emerging only gradually in the enterprise. “It will be a draining of the pond,” says Dave Girouard, president of enterprise for Google. While more than 500,000 organizations of varying sizes use Google Apps, more than half use the free version, according to Girouard.

Moving HR Functions to Google Apps

Now that he has let employees dabble in Google Apps, Patel is considering moving applications related to human resources, such as absence reporting and expense reporting, to cloud computing. He is also eyeing Amazon’s Web services, which include both storage and server capacity. “Clearly from an enterprise standpoint we’re going to take some baby steps first, try out some lower-priority applications to be sure it’s a strong platform,” Patel says.

In general, CIOs say cloud computing, whether it’s software services or additional server or storage capacity, needs to improve a bit before enterprises will adopt on a larger scale. Security and reliability are big challenges. When Amazon’s S3 storage service went down, many companies had trouble doing business. For smaller companies, the trade-off between the cost savings of using Amazon’s service and the occasional hiccup in reliability is worth it. “With Amazon, the benefits of easy scalability and low price far outweigh the occasional downtime,” says Peter Yared, CEO of iWidgets a small company, who estimates he spends four times less by using Amazon Web services vs. conventional server hosting. Although Yared’s Web site worked on July 20, he had trouble for about six hours with some user-generated code that was stored on Amazon’s S3 service. Still, larger companies typically require a higher degree of reliability.

Another issue that worries CIOs is the ability to comply with regulations, including Sarbanes-Oxley rules that govern corporate financial reporting, and the Health Insurance Portability & Accountability Act (HIPPA), which sets rules for security and privacy of health records. ITricity, a European provider of cloud computing capacity, couldn’t previously offer services to companies that required compliance with financial and health-care regulations. Currently, though, the company is installing what’s known as a private cloud using IBM’s Blue Cloud software and services, which turns a corporate data center into its own cloud. Since a private corporate cloud is blocked off from the Internet with firewalls, it provides a level of security that will make it possible for iTricity to offer services to the accounting, financial, and health-care markets.

Finding a Middle Way

In the past six and a half months, iTricity has spent more than $779,000 upgrading to IBM’s new technology. That technology promises to give iTricity much more agility in offering services to customers. Now, customers who want additional computing capacity must wait a week. IBM’s approach will cut that lag time roughly to an hour or less, iTricity says. “Our new slogan with iTricity capacity in the market is power by the hour and power within the hour,” says Robert Rosier, founder and CEO of iTricity.

Because companies have such a large investment in existing technology infrastructure, many people think there will be a hybrid approach where companies will do some of their computing internally, possibly in a private cloud, while other tasks will be offloaded to the public cloud. “One of the key challenges for corporate IT departments, in fact, lies in making the right decisions about what to hold onto and what to let go,” writes Nicholas Carr in his book, The Big Switch.

Girouard at Google says he is confident more and more companies will get comfortable with letting go. “Over time as larger and larger businesses decide to use Google Apps, there will be an upswing in the revenue,” he says. Right now, Google’s strategy is to get as many people and companies as possible comfortable using Google Apps. To that end, the company is doing things like providing Google Apps for free to universities. “We’re generating millions of users for life,” he says.

Patel and a growing number of employees at Sanmina may well be among them.

King is a writer for BusinessWeek.com in San Francisco.