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Government Cloud, Technology

Govt lags on Google growth curve

By Robin Hicks | 9 October 2010

Google Enterprise is the fastest growing division of Google’s Asia operation, the company’s fastest growing market. But governments have so far contributed little to the “hockey stick-shaped” adoption curve of Google’s cloud services.

Doug Farber, Managing Director of Google Enterprise, Asia Pacific, told FutureGov that although the company was in “advanced discussions” with numerous government prospects, the public sector has on the whole been slower to try cloud services such as Google Apps, its office suite.

The financial services sector has also been a slow adopter, but would eventually follow the lead taken “by 60 per cent of the world’s brands to ‘go Google’”, said Farber, who joined Google after a nine-year stint with Salesforce.com last September.

Google does not report its earnings by vertical, so it’s difficult to say how much of total revenue comes from the public sector, Farber noted.

“Banks, like governments, are going through a period of evaluation,” he said. “We are at the early stage of a hockey stick-shaped growth curve. Some segments take longer to come on board.”

Necessarily protracted decision-making processes in the public sector will naturally slow uptake, he added.

Of Google Apps platforms, which include traditional office suite tools such as word processing (Google Docs), and new introductions such as Google Sites, which allows users to create and share group web sites, its email service, Gmail, has proved the most popular with the public sector.

The email, video chat, voice, and instant messaging service is used – officially and unofficially - by government operations in India, the Philippines, and the United States.

Educators have also been keen users of Gmail, New South Wales’ Department of Education, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, and Singapore’s Ministry of Education, among the region’s recent Asian converts.

Partly driven by the need to drive down cost, the education sector is regarded as Google’s most promising public sector vertical. Farber says that at US$50 per seat per year, Google Apps is available for between six and eight times less than the price of rival office suite providers.

The security question

On data security and privacy, a sensitive issue for governments, Farber said that Google is better equipped than any organisation to make cloud services secure.

“We have the most sophisticated infrastructure and the best people in the world. We’re confident we can manage data security as well as anybody,” said Farber. “Cloud is the answer to the problem, not the problem.”

He said that he recognised that there were early reservations, “but that’s the nature of the adoption curve. Some have jumped on early. Other will follow eventually. Salesforce saw this in the early stages. The tipping point will come.”

Last month (September 2010), starting with government, education and ‘Google Apps Premier’ customers, Google began rolling out a two-step verification login to improve the security of its services. After entering a username and password, account holders will need to enter a verification code.

Working in the clouds

Globally, Google Apps has around 30 million end users. Microsoft Office Web Apps, which offers free versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint made available online to Hotmail or Windows Live users this summer, is also seeing brisk growth, with 20 million users.

Looking to the future, Farber suggested that the younger generation will naturally push cloud thinking into the workplace, and will further drive up the adoption rate of cloud.

“Millenials and Generation Y’ers are living in the cloud without thinking twice about it. They are coming into the workforce and changing the way we operate,” he said.

“The enterprise applications used in the typical office are usually clunky and not very intuitive. The incoming generation is used to working collaboratively with intuitive tools, and will expect no less when they start new jobs.”

The level of innovation seen in enterprise IT has been outpaced by consumer applications such as YouTube, Skype, and Facebook, driven through the web, and consumer devices such as BlackBerry, iPhone and iPad, Farber commented.

To drive innovation in enterprise services on its platforms, Google has created a marketplace where cloud-based business applications are developed - Google Apps Engine for Business - and traded and deployed, on Google Apps Marketplace.

The services launched in March and May, respectively, this year.

The social element

So can social media platforms be integrated into its enterprise suite? Not yet. Farber said that Google Apps already offers a social element through Chat, Video and Buzz, but he conceded that his former employer, Salesforce, had a “good product” in Chatter, a Facebook-like collaboration platform.

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