So let’s look at the news from an enterprise perspective – starting with the blog posted here:
Google I/O, our annual developer conference, kicked off this morning in San Francisco with more than 6,000 developers in person and millions more on the livestream. This year, 41 percent of live attendees represent companies that develop business-to-business (B2B) applications, which validates what we’ve known for a while: there’s great demand for better apps in the workplace. People want to work the way they live and use the apps and tools they love, whether they’re at home or in the office.
MyPOV – We give kudos to Google for the focus on looking at how people work, one of our main research areas in ‘’Future of Work’. If Google can successfully position its products and cloud services as part of the transformation happening in the workplace, this will be hugely beneficial and differentiate the Google cloud offerings from the rest of the competitive field.
[…] Introducing Google Drive for Work and updates to Google Docs
· Already, 190 million people actively use Drive at home, school or work, while companies like Crate & Barrel, HP, Jaguar Land Rover, Seagate and Tory Burch and rely on it to work faster and to connect employees and customers. Now, we’re making Drive even better for business with Google Drive for Work — a new premium offering for businesses that includes unlimited storage, advanced audit reporting and new security controls for $10/user/month.
· As of today, all files uploaded to Google Drive will be encrypted, not only from your device to Google and in transit between Google data centers, but also at rest on Google servers.
MyPOV – This is a key step for Google to move the so far more consumer centric Google Drive product over to the enterprise space. It looks like Google has listened to its customers (some even mentioned above) to increase enterprise capabilities of Google Drive. Encryption and audit trails where high on the wish list. From an overall market perspective Google is entrenching into a space of Box and Dropbox – the result of which should be more competition and definitively better TCO for enterprises.
· Quickoffice is now full integrated into Docs, Sheets and Slides, so you can open and edit those documents inOffice Compatibility Mode directly on Android, your Chrome browser and coming soon to iOS. This means you can open, edit, save and send Microsoft Word, Excel® and PowerPoint® files from your favorite device. You no longer have to buy additional software — it just works.
MyPOV – An overview move by Google – the subset of functionality directly available in the browsers was a nuisance for users. More importantly it is not competitive with Microsoft Office that runs across platforms. Google is playing catchup now, with functionality coming to iOS later. Of course Google will stress the free license here, which is overall again good news for enterprises on the TCO front.
Reimagining developer productivity and data analytics in the cloud with Google Cloud Platform
· Google Cloud Dataflow, a managed service designed to help developers and companies process large datasets quickly and efficiently, was introduced today at Google I/O. Based on ten years of internal research and development, Cloud Dataflow is designed to let you focus on getting actionable insights from your data, while leaving the management, tuning, sweat and tears to Google.
MyPOV – Google has had a number of interesting and valuable analytics capabilities for a long time, the announcement of Google Cloud Dataflow looks like a response to Amazon’s Kinesis product. It will be interesting to see how they two differ in developer / analytic scientist report as well as TCO and ease of use.
· To enhance application management and operations in production, we’re launching Google Cloud Monitoring, built on the technology of Stackdriver, a company that recently joined Google, and introducing new tracing and debugging tools to increase developer productivity.
MyPOV – An overdue move to give enterprises more and better visibility into what they are running and how to operate it in Google Cloud. It will be key to watch how the Stackdriver capabilities will be merged and enhanced with the existing Google Monitoring and Ops capabilities.
· We’re making it easier for mobile developers to build on our platform with a new version of Google Cloud Save and improved integrations in Android studio.
MyPOV – No surprise – Google sees mobile as a key platform and enabling Android studio more makes it easier to build and run Android applications.
Today we also announced new features that are slated to launch in the next Android release — “L” — that are intended for enterprises. These features will make the transition for users from work to play more seamless, and provide IT administrators with more options to keep their employees' data secure and easy to access. Businesses will also be able buy apps in bulk on Google Play and make them available to employees — great for admins, great for developers. […]
MyPOV – Across all announcements the enterprise friendly extension of Android “L” should create the biggest value for enterprises. Security, MDM etc. are all key considerations for enterprises when enabling enterprise processes on mobile devices and it’s good to see Google doing even more in that direction.
Overall MyPOV
Google has so many things going for them – from traditional advertising business over Glass and self-driving cars, it’s hard to filter out the enterprise relevant news. But it is good to see the continued investment into enterprise capabilities that creates value for enterprise customers. We will look at how the experiences of enterprises up taking these capabilities will look like in the coming quarters. In the meantime Google needs to keep working on its enterprise friendliness to succeed against the entrenched enterprise players.
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