2012 is going to be another record breaking year in Enterprise technology with more and more machines, smartphones, tablets and other devices coming on line with inbuilt enterprise capabilities.
We look ahead to the next 12 months to envisage and predict what technological advances and shifts will impact business, industry and technology as well as highlighting the best external predictions we’ve seen:
- “The Shift to Apps” 2012 will see several large, major corporations such as General Motors and others move en masse to cloud solution providers like Google. Any takers for a microsoft shareprice of below $20 by year end?
- “The Social Enterprise” More and more companies will use Social Media to drive communication amongst their employees, replacing Email or newsletters as the main channel for these communications. Google+, Tibbr, Yammer, Facebook and Twitter will form the backbone of new company intranets and employee communication vehicles. White Stratus has started doing this already and it has been well received by all of our employees so far, especially those in far-flung locations.
- “Bring Your Own Device” As IT budgets become squeezed tighter, more companies will authorize and encourage their employees to use their own devices in the workplace – smartphones, laptops and tablets. They will be used for work purposes but with new security and privacy capabilities to ensure corporate standards are met. With their own technology, workers will also take advantage of the mobility and will work remotely and from home more often by taking advantage of various cloud-based technologies, without any loss of productivity or data.
- “The World Goes Chrome” 2012 will see the Google Chrome Browser take over from Internet Explorer as the Number One web browser. In Q4 it overtook Firefox as the second most popular browser and is rapidly gaining on IE. Google Apps for Business will help companies who use IE to convert to Chrome and the active Chrome ads on the revamped Google search and on YouTube will really make a dent in the market.
- “Year of the Web Only Device” Web Only devices like Google’s Chrome Notebook, which can be leased for pocket change will start to rise in 2012. We predict that at least one large US brand name, probably a retailer or an airline will roll these devices out to their front line employees, changing the way we think about information workers and the costs of giving them computing devices.
- “New Cloud Standards” 2012 will see increased discussion on the need for universal cloud standards and protocols across the world. It will take years to formalize, and will initially see several competing frameworks but ultimately a single body and code will emerge for every cloud to adhere to.
- “Industry Consolidation” As an industry grows and matures, so consolidation follows, as it will for the cloud both horizontally and vertically. For example, large IaaS players will roll-up regional and smaller IaaS and hosting providers, as well as vertically – where Iaas providers will beging to acquire cloud management system providers such as RightScale and enStratus.
Google has recently launched its new Google+ Pages for businesses – a service similar to Facebook fan pages currently used by many companies, celebrities, and brands. This has been a long, anticipated rollout, and it’s still in the early stages – it has just been in the wild for a couple of months. Google+ business profiles were initially restricted to just a few users such as Angry Birds and Zen Bikes (so Google could advertise the new service for businesses from A-Z!).
Now, any organization with a Google Apps for Business account and a website can create a profile. Of course, much of the functionality of Google+ relies on the use of Google Apps. So, opening access to all businesses can provide an accessible and logical gateway for Google to penetrate even further into the enterprise market.
The Long Wait Will Bring Better Quality
Benefits of Google+ for Enterprise Level Users
The idea behind Google+ Pages is to support and help create a social business culture. Consumers are using social networking to talk about businesses and brands. This makes it imperative for businesses to join in and influence the conversation. Google+ provides another way to do this by making your company more approachable, reachable and credible. Being active on Google+ can help a business make every “touch” or interaction count. Detailed analytics are available in this platform, so companies will be able to accurately evaluate the effect of their social sharing efforts.
But Google+ isn’t just about connecting with external customers and business partners. It is designed to enhance real-time internal communication, collaboration, and connection as well. Interdepartmental mingling and networking won’t be limited to the company Holiday party or cold, outdoor team-building exercises. Co-workers from different departments can interact and put faces with names using a company sanctioned social network site at work.
All forms of company communication from emails to calendar scheduling, blogs, and corporate memos can be streamed into a central feed or ‘stream;. This one-stop approach cuts down the chance that important information is lost in the shuffle. The effective use of Google+ has the potential to cut communication costs by providing a single location where all employees can find the information they need. At the same time, since Google+ is interactive, employees’ communication experience is enhanced by the ability to ask questions or offer direct feedback on items that appear in the company’s “stream”.
With these capabilities, it isn’t just Facebook and LinkedIn that face a challenge from Google+. Microsoft SharePoint currently commands a large sector of the enterprise space for inter-company networking. Now, Google+ for Business can not only replace, but actually improve upon, much of the functionality offered by MS.
Potential Pitfalls of Google+ in the Business World
But ultimately employees will respond to being trusted and encouraged to interact using the new medium and will generally tend to respond positively. In anticipation of the new system, employees should be encouraged to play around with Google+ themselves to familiarize themselves with the new environment and offer advice and ideas themselves on how it can be better implemented by the company. Social Media is a genuine two-way process, not the simple ‘push’ messaging model that has been used for the previous 50 years. A company’s employees are also its biggest advocates and brand ambassadors and anything you can do to make it easier for them to spread the word, can only help in the long term.
Although the deadline for action occurs later this month, the planning and preparation for the event have been ongoing for approximately a year in themselves.
The client, who would prefer to remain anonymous but can be referred to as SC, outlines his organization’s previous difficulties before migrating his operation to the cloud using Google Apps for Business.
“White Stratus have really helped me organize my stable, of er, work. We dealt with a lot of paperwork arriving daily from literally all over the world. One of my assistants had to go through and sort them into two distinct categories for processing. One for immediate consideration, codenamed the ‘nice’ pile, and one which would require further investigation, codenamed the ‘naughty’ pile.”
“White Stratus helped us shift our incoming communications to Gmail to allow easier sorting and tracking of the lists. We were able to easily create customer files that we could allocate them to and add stars for further action if required – to see if they had changed their ways since we received the list for example. We were also able to customize our email address so myself and my associates were able to have our own personal inboxes – mine is S****C****@NorthPole.com.”
“Some of the more technical clients submitted their lists via Word, PDFs, Spreadsheets – you name it, so Google Docs was tremendous in being able to view them in formats we were comfortable in using. Because they come from all over the world, we were also able to use the built-in Translate function to make sure it can be translated into Elvish – the local dialect.”
“Our resident CIO, Mr Patch, was delighted to learn that White Stratus could give us a functioning Google Sites for Business setup. He was able to create and administer an online shopping cart system to process the orders we were receiving from our clients. Access to the site was controlled by him so only the supervisors could edit what materials their departments needed to complete their orders. They could also chat directly with each other using Google Talk messages and Groups.”
“Some projects with multiple materials – metal and wood for instance, require different teams to work together on the same project so Google Cloud Connect will allow them to work on the same document simultaneously. We are also looking into Google video to record our best practices for new recruits. Failing Elf can effect our business at any time so we need to maintain the knowledge that we have acquired over many, many, many years.”
“I sometimes have to spend time away from the shop-floor looking after another section of the company – our livestock operation – so we use Google+ to connect with my key personnel and hangout with them so I can oversee the work at firsthand, or as close to firsthand as I can be whilst feeding a herd of Reindeer.”
“As we get closer to the 24 hour delivery window our customers expect, we use Google Sites to make sure that our orders are correct and are loaded into the correct sections of the delivery sleigh for easy distribution. I take a very hands-on approach to the distribution operation and as the Sleigh is fitted with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, I can easily log onto our cloud-based system to check for any last minute changes or amendments that might have been made.”
“Our routes are quite complex so we also integrate Google Maps into our logistics planning to make sure that we are hitting all of the drop-off points more or less when we need to. Because we function across multiple timezones, we are able to cover a wide area in a set timeframe and deliver succesfully 99% of the time. It’s thanks to the good boys and girls at White Stratus and Google Apps for Business that our traditional family business can both survive and thrive in the 21st Century. I really don’t know Ho Ho How we managed before!”
Google’s reach into the enterprise community keeps expanding.
First, there was the launch of Google Apps for Business. Then, there was Google+ business pages for companies of all sizes. At the same time, Google’s web page generator tool is being expanded to offer even more features that may attract bigger businesses to the platform. Previously, the Google Sites offering was targeted specifically at individuals and small organizations. The key selling points for these users were the low cost, superior speed, simple layout, and easy editing. It was the go-to platform to build a website for companies that didn’t have an IT department or the budget to hire an outside web design firm.
However, attracting enterprise level customers requires something more sophisticated – something beyond low initial costs and an undemanding learning curve. Larger organizations have more complex needs and want more features and functionality. In most cases, they have already got a working intranet platform. Switching to a different platform such as Google Site needs to be a fully-fledged upgrade – not just a lateral move. Here are a few of the benefits businesses can gain from going Google:
A Full Toolkit
The Google Site offers many useful tools and a full updated library of gadgets from calendar and calculator functions to RSS feeds for news updates and blogs, etc. Of course, the site is fully compatible with the rest of the Google environment as well including YouTube and Picasa. Any company that is already using Google Apps for Business has the potential to increase the functionality of these applications and improve ROI by implementing a Google Site solution to tie it all together. You can start with Google Site and add Apps later, or vice-versa. Either way, the potential for real time sharing and collaboration is increased substantially.
Administration Made Simple
The Google interface is very straightforward. A company can select individuals outside of IT as the primary administrators to relieve the burden from tech employees. Users don’t have to know HTML or other coding languages. It’s all WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) and point and click with a wide range of templates. Of course, more experienced users can customize the templates and create entirely new layouts as they wish to match the company’s “look and feel”. These options give Google Sites the kind of flexibility most enterprise customers find attractive.
Administrators can create content, determine who has access to information and who can contribute or upload new files. Again, since the site is primarily user-friendly, these responsibilities can be assigned to whoever is the most appropriate choice from a business standpoint. Someone in Marketing might have the best feel for how to leverage the social and PR facets of the technology for outward facing portions of the site. An HR staff member could hold the keys to making the internal communication aspects of the site work. A project manager could be involved in administering team-based activities. The choices are limitless and can be changed at a moments notice by the administrator.
Gearing Up for the Great Google Migration
How feasible is it to move an existing intranet site to Google Site? White Stratus is in the process of rolling out a large scale intranet website migration for multinational customers today. We expect the success of these projects to serve as a springboard for other companies to start taking advantage of Google Sites as well. This template will serve as the model for all future Intranet conversions for big companies or small.
Google Sites is backed by the technological excellence and innovation of Google along with their constant and consistent drive to make their products the easiest to use on the web. Why not see what Google Site can offer your online presence today?
The recent collaboration agreement between SAP and Google is a union of different corporate traditions and approaches. SAP has the “legacy of an insular engineering culture that could accurately be accused of suffering from a ‘not invented here’ complex,” explains Forbes writer Dan Woods. Google on the other hand, is better known for emphasizing access and communication, with a workplace crafted around openness. What does this relationship mean and how will change the enterprise computing landscape?
While the SAP and Google cultures are distinct from one another, this partnership plays to each company’s strengths. As Google+ demonstrates, Google’s strength is increasingly becoming its role as a platform for communication. SAP however, is known for business solutions that improve workflow and make aspects of a business more efficient. The Google APIs that will be paired with SAP products will do both of these, and they will leverage Google’s focus on communication as well.
Previous Collaboration Success
This is not the first time Google and SAP have worked together. In December 2010, SAP began offering StreamWork, a business management and collaboration tool, through the Google Apps Marketplace for $9 per month. As an app designed for document and knowledge sharing, it integrated well with other popular apps in the Marketplace (for example, Evernote and Scribd), and also fits with Google’s primary goal — providing and sharing information.
However, unlike the three and a half year deal just announced between Google and SAP, StreamWork is not a jointly engineered product, nor does it represent a major departure from many of the business apps already available. Perhaps even more importantly, it is not really an app for the enterprise.
Why the new Google & SAP Partnership is Special
This deal integrates Google Maps, Earth and several other APIs into SAP business enterprise solutions, such as BusinessObjects. Its goal is to provide companies with visual and geospatial data, as opposed to traditional information datasets. The underpinnings of this strategy are built on the idea that ‘big data’ – the massive amounts of information that can now be transferred seamlessly around the world – is often difficult to use in a decision-making setting. If data can be easily visualized, then it can also be easily utilized.
In practical terms, this means that business leaders will have increased access to usable knowledge. They should be able to cut through the clutter of data and jump straight to the key points. For example, an agribusiness that maintains crops and facilities around the nation could better understand the regions where they are reaping more revenue or having crop failures by layering key information on a map.
What This Means for the Enterprise
The even bigger implication here is that SAP is making a leap into the clouds. SAP is one of the first key players in the enterprise world to take a piece of the cloud architecture and throw it into their core enterprise products line. This hybridization of SAP’s products is not part of the company’s DNA, but it is a good decision. Even though SAP already offers Business ByDesign in the cloudspace, it is not built for the enterprise but for SMBs. By staking its spot in the cloud, the company is positioning its future and the direction of ERP software.
The benefits are not any smaller for Google. Having aggressively pushed into the enterprise over the last few years, it is becoming an integral part of many companies’ strategies. By partnering with SAP, Google is tying its name to one of the most respected and trusted names in this field. It is also ensuring that its name gets higher visibility with the companies in the enterprise who have turned to SAP to power their productivity. Since a number of enterprise businesses that use Google Apps do so on a limited basis, this partnership might just be the extra push Google needs to gain credibility and trust in this sphere.
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Google Apps provides an excellent set of capabilities for messaging and collaboration at a market leading price point. But any investment no matter how cost effective, requires an RoI, so making sure Google Apps is being adopted by the business, and extending it to support additional business functionality is a critical step for Google Apps customers. We call this going ‘Beyond Google’.
Companies can go Beyond Google and improve RoI in 3 stages.
Stage 1: Maximize adoption of the full Google Apps suite. This means making sure employees understand the benefits of Google Docs, and are using them to collaborate. Use-case analysis, hands on training and rapid proof-of-concept deployments can help here. Maximizing Google Apps adoption can also mean deploying Google Sites as your intranet – you have paid for it, why not use it?.
Step 2: Take Business Processes into the Cloud. Many companies who move to Google Apps continue to run legacy applications in Lotus Notes or Sharepoint. Others run inefficient and error-prone manual (or “excelware”) processes. Fill out a form, email, approve, print, sign, scan, email again etc etc. Now that you have Google Apps, these days are over. With very little effort, workflow like Purchase Orders, Timesheets, Vacation Requests, Marketing Flows, Sales Processes and Project Management can be moved into your Google Apps environment, driving significant transparency and efficiency gains.
Step 3: Integrate your Core IT. You have stepped into the cloud with Google Apps why not extend those advantages to the rest of your IT environment. Google Apps is designed to be tied into the rest of your IT environment. Perhaps your CRM system should automatically create Google Docs for your sales team, or your ERP system should be updated via shared Google spreadsheet, or your custom built on-premise platform needs to be brought into line with your new cloud environment. With new powerful integration and development tools available for Google Apps, as well as a whole host of efficient new cloud based solutions on the Google Apps marketplace, enterprises can often move Core IT into the cloud quickly, and for less than the maintenance costs they are paying for their legacy platforms.
So where do you start? We use a short ‘Beyond Google’ diagnostic developed by our Google Apps Certified Deployment Specialists that helps identify opportunities and assess the impact of change. Often the answer is obvious and all it takes is the knowledge of a Google Apps expert, combined with the pragmatic experience of a client operations expert.
In 2008 Intuit’s QuickBooks possessed 94% of the small business accounting software market, but there are ominous signs for it in the cloud. Software as a service (SaaS) is changing accounting for the better and for good. While QuickBooks does offer an online iteration, a number of newer and hipper companies are innovating in the cloud to bring even easier to use and cheaper software to small business owners.
Part of this is because QuickBooks’ on-premise software can be expensive for many of the people who need it. Plus, on-premise software requires users to buy the newest updates year after year at added cost. And of course there are those who simply don’t like QuickBooks or programs like it, but still need that level of accounting functionality. As Helen Matterson, Communications Manager at Xero,put it: “The small business segment is crying out for functional software that is easy to use.”
The new breed of accounting apps is meeting this demand. For example, many of these apps support as much as 100 currency and tax types and target atypical and freelance business models. One of the best features commonly offered is unlimited user access, which allows for collaboration around the globe. Even QuickBooks Online limits the max user number to five.
Saying that, QuickBooks Online provides impressive functionality and an array of useful tools. And it can be purchased cheaply enough too: QuickBooks Online comes in five packages – ranging from $12.95 to $78.95 a month. It also has many of the features its newer rivals have, and, surprisingly, some they don’t – like iPhone and Android apps – while providing roughly 80 percent of the functionality in the on-premise software.
On the other hand, Intuit appears to have made few innovations for the cloud. Not only are they having consistent server outages, but they have been criticized around the web for offering a somewhat dated product.
Still, while other companies and products might be on the cutting edge of innovation, QuickBooks has a brand name that is almost synonymous with small business management. Furthermore, a lot of accountants will put pressure on their clients to use software they understand, usually with names like Peachtree, MYOB or QuickBooks.
It will be a while yet until Intuit feels threatened in the small business market. On-premise versions of QuickBooks are still very popular, and brand trust is key when it comes to sensitive financial data. But cloud based accounting apps are still making their presence felt, shaking up the market and forcing the big names to make some changes.
Last week alone, Sage unveiled greater cloud investment at the Sage Summit as well as a full American re-branding effort, including of the Peachtree accounting line. Some analysts see this as a way for Sage to try and maintain its market position with increasing levels of competition from a number of sectors. Regardless of the direct implications, one can be sure that change is underway.
David Matthew writes about online accounting software at Software Advice
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Are you Buying at the Top?
Would you ever buy a $200 share purely because it costs more than a $20 share? Would you ever buy into a company today just because it is older, or has more employees, or has more production facilities? Would you buy into one industry because it has been around longer than another? If you answered “yes”, then you should stop investing right now, and put your money under the mattress. It will be safer there. And you shouldn’t apply for a job as a CIO.
In the course of our work as an Enterprise Partner of Google, we often help CIO’s evaluate cloud technologies for their business. Sometimes these discussions are comfortingly strategic, but on many occasions they get down to the “Functionality Fallacy” – detailed comparison of the many functional requirements that different solutions support. Does the solution support shared folders? Can I track whether an email was read or not? Can I change the background color? (yes I have been asked that). These questions are no longer just frustratingly time wasting, they entirely miss the mark when it comes to making the right decision about investing in software today.
The traditional software world, to the extent it still exists, sells the CIO a static (and typically very expensive) product. It is a product that is going to remain unchanged until it is upgraded or replaced many years later. In this world it is critical to get a detailed understanding of what the product does, before you commit to it, because you are stuck with it for the next 3 years. That is a long time to be thinking ‘if only it had more font options”.
In the cloud software-as-a-service world, you are not buying a static product. You are buying into a dynamic, evolving and growing system. The product you are evaluating right now will have already moved on by the time you sign the contract. And by the time it is configured and the first user logs on, it will have changed again.
Google, arguably the world’s most innovative enterprise company, is a great example of the rapid pace of change in today’s software world. Google released 33 new pieces of functionality for Google Apps in April 2011 alone (go to http://whatsnew.googleapps.com to see the release calendar). At this rate, we might expect around 400 new features by the end of the year. And over the next 3 years (the time it typically takes a traditional software company to release a single new version of a product), you are likely to have at your finger tips more than 1500 new features, many of which have not even been thought of yet. It is not possible today, to know what this new functionality will be – perhaps free multi-point video conferencing?, or real time voice translation through mobile phones? – so why get caught in the Functionality Fallacy and spend time obsessing about the details of what the product does right now?
The right way to evaluate software today is the way investments are made in company shares (after all, you are making an investment of sorts) and that is by asking “what is the expected return over the lifetime of my holding?” In simple terms, thinking about what the share price might be in the future, not what it is today.
In the age of cloud based software, the right questions to ask software vendors are things like “How many new pieces innovations did you release over the last 30 days?”, “What will your product look like in 6 months”?, “What level of support will I get from you and your integration partners?” and “Will your company be around in 3 years?”. This last question is a hard one because it might be easy to think that a large company with a long history is more likely to survive than a fast growing start up but this is never the case in a rapidly changing industry (let’s hope 5 years go you bought into Salesforce and not Novell).
Smart CIO’s today need to be more like Fund Managers, and ask themselves whether they are aligning themselves with companies that can grow over time. They need to select software based on its Future value, not its Current value. CIO’s need software partners who can innovate fast enough to stay on top of the technology curve. This is the key to a healthy software portfolio and a strong return on the investment your CEO’s are counting on you for.
The fact that Google Apps are easy to use is a key reason enterprises are adopting them. However, there are always extra tips and tricks you can use to rise above the basic usage and really start leveraging the hidden potential of Going Google. Make sure you have read our previous 10 tips, then take your organization’s cloud computing ability to the next level with these additional ways to tap the potential of Google Apps:
1. Promote Your Company with a Public Calendar. Create a calendar of speaking engagements and events to attract new clients. Publish the calendar as “publicly viewable” and share it on your website and in your newsletters.
2. No cell reception? Use Audio Chat. Need to make a phone call but your mobile phone doesn’t have any reception? You can use Google Chat to place an outgoing phone call to any of your contacts – even if they are offline!
3. Use Google Docs as a Web Drive. You can now upload any type of file to Google Docs. Use your Doc List as online storage space for important videos, images, files, and data sets that you can access from anywhere, anytime.
4. Save time responding to emails with the Canned Response lab. Do you send the same email response over and over? Create and format the message, save it as a “canned response”, and drop it into any email with one click of the mouse.
5. Share internal video messages securely. With Google Video for business, you can host and share videos within your business’s domain. Messages from the CEO, training modules, and new product releases are great things to share through video.
6. Record and Share Meeting Notes via Google Docs and Calendar. Create one Google Docs to store all notes for a particular meeting and attach it to a calendar event. Everyone in the meeting can edit and view the docs for months or years to come.
7. Share Company Letterhead via the Template Gallery. Upload your letterhead and branded collateral to your domain’s private template gallery. This way, you ensure that everyone is using the same images, colors, and company information.
8. Teach Gmail to Put Priority Messages at the Top of Your Mailbox. Using the Priority Mailbox feature, you can mark messages either “important” or “not important”. After a few days, Gmail will automatically place new messages that you consider important at the top of your list of messages.
9. Quickly find important information sent to you by chat. Did someone send you a phone number or address via chat? Find it quickly by typing “is:chat” into the Gmail search box along with a few words that you remember from the chat session.
10. Collaborating on a process flow diagram with a coworker? Use Google Drawings and collaborate in real-time. Then, add the completed diagram to a Document, Spreadsheet, or Presentation.
That’s it for today. But as Google Apps is one of the most rapidly and constantly evolving enterprise software products on the market (over 30 new features released in April 2011 alone) there will no doubt be more tips coming soon!
Google is sometimes thought of as a key provider of affordable tools designed for small business. And they seem to be doing this well, claiming that over 4 million of them now use Apps. The Enterprise however needs something more robust, the theory goes, and should be left to professional players like Microsoft or other giants of Major League enterprise software. Is that really the case though? Are large enterprises still committed to slow, stodgy on-premise solutions, or are they breaking the shackles of over-priced legacy players and stepping into the new and exciting public cloud? We thought it was time to find out.
Our recent white paper “Have You Gone Google?” analyzes the market penetration for Google Apps in the U.S., based on our polls and interviews with more than 2000 enterprises in the US. The results we found for 2010 were surprising. Contrary to popular perception, large enterprises are busily taking advantage of the cost-effective capabilities provided by cloud-hosted Google applications.
On average, regardless of size, almost 1 in 5 of the companies we surveyed had deployed at least one of the products in the Google Apps suite. The size of the company however, seems to be directly related to the likelihood that it will be a Google user – and it’s not smaller organizations that are leading the pack. In fact, we found that market penetration for businesses with 10,000+ employees was much higher than the average at close to 1 in 3. What’s driving this push for bigger businesses to give Google a try?
Big Business Ready for Try Outs
Resource availability and knowledge are probably two important factors in whether a business will sample Google. A larger enterprise is more likely to have IT personnel who are aware of the latest developments in the business software sphere. An IT department with the expertise to analyze the pros and cons of a product and direct resources to testing and migration can afford to give new products a shot. The process of Google Apps migration can be complex (especially for something like an email system), which may make it less appealing to small businesses with limited IT experience and resources.
So what does using Google Apps really mean for an enterprise? Have large companies deployed the product across their entire organizations or are they just giving it a work out with a small team. At this point, only a third that have deployed Google Apps have rolled out across their business and many enterprise users (almost half) are still in the pilot phase of their deployment. Enterprise-wide deployment that takes advantage of all the solutions Google offers is not yet the most prevalent scenario, but we know that from a seed grows a tree so the key question in coming months will be “how many of these pilots will grow into company-wide deployments”.
Marketplace Poised for Substantial Changes
In the 2-3 years since Google began offering a viable Enterprise-class product, the Google Apps market share has reached impressive levels. Microsoft has traditionally ruled the enterprise space but now that Google and a few other contenders such as Amazon Web Services and Salesforce are poised to move into the Major League of enterprise software, the competitive landscape is likely to undergo some dramatic changes. Microsoft will have to start scrambling if it wants to hold its ground in the face of Google’s increasingly attractive business offerings and the next 3-5 years will be an exciting battle for dominance. Fortunately for us all, when major league giants battle, it’s the spectator who wins.
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