I am at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston and just attended a session working in the cloud by Rishi Chandra, Product Manager of Google Enterprise. He opened with “Google will have a place in this market and will be driving innovation going forward.” (he might have said all innovation but I am not sure, there was a big crowd). Here are my notes (apologies for any typos) of what he said with my comments in parens:

 Richi said that enterprise 2.0 and web 2.0 , the same thing – all built on the cloud – transition going forward to get there  (not sure I agree here on the sameness of all three of these or even any two of them but I can see how this would be an aspiration of Google – they are certainly smart – maybe they can make it happen – I think there are fundamental differences between web 2.0 and enterprise 2.0 as I have written about on this blog. Also, while the cloud is good for many apps it is not the same as enterprise 2.0)

 Rishi sees four trends

 1. innovation is led by the consumer market and not the enterprise market – a few years ago consumer world had led innovation on the web – and then stuff came into enterprise market – social computing and mobile computing – this is because consumer world is more Darwinian – IT in enterprise slower in change   - vendors and end users are not connected in the enterprise market but in consumer market there is the direct relationship – easy to switch. Can go from Google to Yahoo search in one click so competition is rougher and drives innovation. (I think that now people realize there is an enterprise 2.0 market – competition and innovation will accelerate here also)

Richi said this is good thing for the enterprise as – consumer market tests software. He said that one of Google’s lesson from consumer market  – simplicity wins (I agree here)

2. rise of power collaborator – in the past more individual efforts – now much more on team productivity – now across geographies, divisions, languages and even companies  - but in enterprise – stuff still built for power user not power collaborator (agree with all of this)  need to have multiple people contribute to docs easily  - he said to even translation in the product – also need a publishing platform – he feels the cloud is the right platform – single source of content and everyone can get to it

3. economics of how IT is changing  - data storage is becoming huge – Google has had to deal with this for some time – YouTube uploads tons of data and then there is pictures, etc. – cost curve for storage for Google is going down because of scale – becoming almost free – some unlimited scalability for storage

 4. barriers to adoption are going away 4.1  web access becoming more pervasive

4.2 user experience – more functionality – started with launch of gmail

4.3 reliability – consumers expect total uptime or they will leave immediately

4.4 offline access – there needs to be a solution here – Google launched this with Google docs

4.5 security – could be the more serious – looking at this – now secure are you today – 1 out of 10 laptops stolen within first year – what about losing the thumb drives – they get lost easier – cloud can help here – data resting in the cloud will not be stolen from a hardware device  – but the secure level in the cloud remains a concern – but trust needs to be gained – Google working hard to gain this trust ( I certainly agree with the security issue – I just had my hard drive crash and was lucky that many things were stored on the web and sad that not all was – I will change this now)

 He argues that cloud is already is here and the question is now fast it grows.  Google runs itself off Google apps.  Richi acknowledges it is a new paradigm – so does not have all the answers – He feels that on premise software will not go away but feel that innovation will happen in the cloud – there will be many competitors because the cloud based on open standards – next generation will expect the cloud because they grew up on it.  It was a very clear and informative session, even if I do not agree with all he said (as indicated above).  However, I do agree that if he is right this position will certainly benefit Google.