{"id":872,"date":"2007-09-10T00:01:56","date_gmt":"2007-09-10T06:01:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/wp\/?p=872"},"modified":"2007-09-10T00:01:56","modified_gmt":"2007-09-10T06:01:56","slug":"capgemini_to_pi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=872","title":{"rendered":"Capgemini to pitch Google Apps"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the clearest sign yet that Google Apps may be about to make the leap from small businesses to large ones, a major systems consulting firm, Capgemini, is announcing<\/a> today a partnership with Google to push Apps into the enterprise market. Capgemini is incorporating Apps into its outsourcing service for managing companies’ PC networks. The consultancy says it currently manages about a million desktops for corporate clients. In a statement that is sure to annoy Microsoft, which has long dominated business PCs with its Office suite, Capgemini says that Google Apps represents “the next-generation communication and collaboration tools [workers] need to manage electronic communications, share and publish information, and stay connected while on the go.”<\/p>\n

Google approached Capgemini about the partnership a few months ago, according to Steve Jones, a Capgemini outsourcing executive who oversees the firm’s work with software-as-a-service applications. The move shows that Google believes the time is ripe to make a major push into the enterprise computing market.<\/p>\n

I asked Jones about the commonly heard claim that Google Apps, while fine for little organizations, isn’t “enterprise-ready.” He scoffed at the notion, saying that the objection is just a smokescreen that some CIOs are “hiding behind.” Google Apps, he says, is “already being used covertly” in big companies, behind the backs of IT staffers. The time has come, he argues, to bring Apps into the mainstream of IT management in order to ensure that important data is safeguarded and compliance requirements are met. Jones foresees “a lot of big companies” announcing the formal adoption of Apps.<\/p>\n

But that isn’t happening yet. Though Google and Capgemini have been crafting the announcement of their partnership for a number of weeks, they have yet to sign up any clients – or at least not any that are willing to go public with their plans. Jones says that one of Capgemini’s clients, a US telecommunications firm, is close to a deal for incorporating Google Apps onto some of its desktops. He’s confident the deal will be completed by the end of the month.<\/p>\n

For the near term, Capgemini is pitching Apps largely as a complement to Microsoft Office. Google’s package offers two immediate advantages, according to Jones. First, it allows the many thousands of workers who don’t have their own PCs or their own copies of Office – from factory hands to call-center agents – to gain access to email, calendars, and other personal-productivity applications. Up to now, says Jones, licensing and data-storage costs have prohibited these “disenfranchised employees” from being given access to Office-style apps. Because Google charges only $50 a year per user for Apps and stores all email messages and other data in its own systems, it lowers the cost barrier substantially.<\/p>\n

Second, says Jones, Google Apps simplifies collaboration, particularly between employees working at different companies. With Office and other traditional apps, he says, such collaboration usually entails “lobbing emails over the firewall” with attached files. Such “paper-shuffling” leads to a proliferation of different versions of documents, adding complexity and delays to the process. With Apps, a single version of a document is maintained by Google, and people from different companies can work on it simultaneously. That, contends Jones, can greatly speed up the work of inter-company teams.<\/p>\n

The Google-Capgemini partnership is important because systems consultancies and outsourcers exert a strong influence over the IT decisions of large companies. Google knows that a grass-roots movement alone isn’t enough to break into the enterprise market. I expect that now we’ll see a series of similar partnerships between Google and some of the other big guns in the IT business. Of course, there’s also an irony here. The giant IT consulting firms symbolize the high cost and ornate complexity of traditional IT. You might say that they’re part of the problem that the new wave of Web-based services is supposed to solve. It only goes to show: Business, no less than politics, makes strange bedfellows.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the clearest sign yet that Google Apps may be about to make the leap from small businesses to large ones, a major systems consulting firm, Capgemini, is announcing today a partnership with Google to push Apps into the enterprise market. Capgemini is incorporating Apps into its outsourcing service for managing companies’ PC networks. The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-872","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/872","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=872"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/872\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=872"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=872"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=872"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}