cruel to be kind

Marc Orchant has a great peace on Much ado about Google Apps about how real enterprise does not at all consider Google Apps as a replacement. And he has what has got to be my new favourite quote (emphasis mine):

Ken Bisconti, vice president of messaging and collaboration software for IBM, is quoted in the article as saying at this year’s Enterprise 2.0 Conference:

“Most of our customers tell us they’re talking to the Google enterprise team,” he said. “Google is doing a good job of collecting information to understand enterprise requirements. … I don’t see them as a near-term competitor but as a long-term potential substitution.”

That makes perfect sense. What surprised me was the breathlessly repeated summation of the report and article that anyone in the enterprise who advocates immediate adoption of Google Apps is facing a potentially “career limiting” decision. As Josh Catone at Read/Write Web wrote, “File this one under ‘D’ for ‘Duh’”. It almost made me want to immediately conduct a survey of enterprise IT managers and C-level folks to see if I could find anyone who was actually considering adoption of Google Apps as anything more than a comparative learning exercise.

Here’s the bottom line from my considered perspective. There is a small minority segment of the overall population that wants to work in the cloud full-time. […]

But the inescapable and inarguable truth is that online-only appeals only to a minority of users. And in the enterprise, to almost no one. Too many questions remain unanswered from SLAs (Service Level Agreements) and QoS (Quality of Service) guarantees to security to disaster recovery to redundancy to… well, you get the idea. This is the brad and butter of enterprise deployment decision-making and no one has really convinced the enterprise that this critical stuff has been adequately addressed. So the poking and prodding continues but the go/no go decision is still off in the mists.

This so much reflects my feeling of visiting last years Office 2.0 conference and the discussion I had as well as overheard in the corners.

The absolut irritation of providers of so called “we will take over the world” Web 2.0 application makers and them finding out that yes, the famous global IT stops even taking notice of them when they start their proposal with “first you give us your data”. What maybe working with normal users, is never going to work with somebody in charge who understands enterprise.

The the people in the cloud: Get more into the real world. Get yourself a mentor who takes you to the real life. It is not pretty, but worth your while. ;)

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