In the wake of my last post about Google's aspirations in the enterprise market, I came across (thanks to a reader) another, even more interesting interview with Dave Girouard, Google's top enterprise guy. This one was done by Dan Briody, of CIO Insight, and it looks at how "Google is aiming to become the primary interface for all enterprise applications." Girouard tells Brody, "Information access is a big problem in the enterprise ... We don't see ourselves as a Web-search company. We don't see ourselves as a consumer company. We see ourselves as an information company."
In my prior post, I noted how Google appears intent on entering the enterprise through the end users, bypassing the IT department. And I suggested that that approach may not be enough - that getting deep into the corporate market will require addressing management needs as well as empowering users. Girouard discusses this theme, obliquely, in his interview with Briody. He emphasizes the primary concentration on the user: "what's unique about us, I think, is we're really tapping into the pace of innovation that's happening on the consumer side ... We want to leverage innovation happening on the consumer side that is end-user focused and channel that in a pragmatic way into enterprise technology ... That comes really from Larry and Sergey."
But then he acknowledges that "we have to bring the sensibility that there are other constituencies involved here." By "other constituencies," he means CIOs and other corporate managers. At the center of this effort, Girouard makes clear, is Google's corporate "search appliance" (for searching all the data flowing through a company's computer network) and, in particular, its new "OneBox" feature. (Girouard announced the OneBox addition a couple of weeks ago, saying, unconvincingly, "For the record, we have no desire or plans to kill anything.") OneBox, which is already a feature of Google's public search engine, provides at the top of a list of search results "a special set of results" intended to quickly and immediately answer whatever question you're seeking to answer. Girouard gives an example: "if you typed in 'weather San Francisco,' you would get a five-day weather forecast inserted at the top of the results." With OneBox, in other words, Google goes beyond passively searching information to actively synthesizing information drawn from all the sources it searches. That's a crucial difference (one I hadn't fully grasped before reading this interview), and Girouard believes that OneBox's information synthesis capability "could be a very powerful tool inside the enterprise."
This is where it gets really interesting. Girouard says:
For Google OneBox for Enterprise we went out and talked to a lot of business application vendors about making their information much more accessible through a simple search interface. For example, we talked to Oracle, Cognos, SAS Institute, Salesforce.com, Cisco and a few others. But essentially the idea is that just the same way you could look up a weather forecast on Google, you could easily tap into your Salesforce.com system and find out about a sales opportunity ... Basically, it means real-time access to another system. There's no lag. It's real-time access to a piece of information that resides in another system ...
But the user experience - and this is really important to us - entirely mimics how Google.com works. So, you don't have to get training; you can discover it over time; a friend can show you a OneBox that they think is particularly useful. For example, one of our partners is Oracle, and you'll be able to look up a purchase-order in your Oracle financial system because Google will recognize what a purchase order number looks like. Just like Google.com recognizes a UPS tracking number. The Enterprise system will know what an Oracle purchase order looks like, and it will insert that information right at the top ... We expect that search will become the preferred way to access these systems. If I want to access my CRM system, if I want to quickly grab a piece of information out of my business intelligence system, I don't have to be an expert in those systems anymore. I can type a few keywords into Google and get that information.
Well, there you have it. What Microsoft is trying to do with its new Duet partnership with SAP - provide a user-friendly way to tap into data from a complex enterprise system - Google is trying to do on a much grander scale. It wants to be a front end for everything. One wonders if the big application providers will really want to forfeit the user interface - and the power it represents - to Google. One also wonders whether they'll have a choice.
