One of the major knocks on SaaS (and Web based apps in general) is what happens when you have no connectivity. As an analyst I travel a fair deal and many of my most productive hours are spent sitting on a plane responding to email, writing reports, and catching up on all the research I should be reading but often don’t have time for. What I can’t do: file my expense reports, close my CRM records, or complete my end-of-quarter evaluations. All of these apps are delivered to me online.

All things considered this has never been that big of a deal for me. But it hasn’t stopped SaaS critics from knocking these apps as insufficient. Not surprisingly there have been two ways to handle such concerns. First — the route taken by Etelos, Zoho (via GoogleGears), and others — is building apps that have the ability to go offline and then sync back up on re-connectivity. This works quite well with Outlook and my mail file, but frankly gets pretty complicated when we start talking about collaborative applications like spreadsheets, powerpoint decks, or Word documents, all of which are leading candidates for SaaS delivery. The second tactic — the route that Google seems to be taking, despite GoogleGears — is to wait it out; connectivity will eventually catch up to the apps.

Right now I have to give a big vote for the latter tactic. As I write I’m somewhere over Pennsylvania on an American Airlines flight from JFK to SFO. I’m on my way home from Thanksgiving and using Gogo, the Aircell offering available now on select AA routes. Though I couldn’t use iPass — the single best application Forrester provides us — sign up for Gogo was fast and efficient. I even had a brief chat conversation with a customer service rep to get things squared away. The connectivity is fantastic and, if I were to be honest, better than I’ve had the last week in Connecticut (thank you Stamford Sheraton). With one easy transaction one of the last places I get stuck without connectivity is gone — at least when I fly from JFO to SFO. Best of all Hulu is working like a champ. Now I just have to get those damned expense reports filed . . . as soon as I’m done with this episode of It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia.

Comments Off

As you may have noticed already I am an unabashed Google skeptic — at least when it comes to Google in the enterprise. They have yet to show me they are truly committed to the enterprise space, and the customers they have shown thus far have frankly been a bit disappointing; they are mostly small, techie, and or higher education. The pace of product innovation has been slow — how long has it been now since I lost my bet with Rob Koplowitz about GoogleGears? — and the numbers Google provides for the size of the business are dramatically skewed by the Postini acquisition.

Today Google announced a webinar with Genentech. The $12bn pharmaceutical will discuss its 12,000 employee implementation of Google Calendar. As best I can tell that represents the entire employee base for the company. Impressive. We’ll have to keep a close eye on how deep the Google apps suite works its way into the company — I’d like to hear that Google is running Genentech’s email, a truly mission critical app, but calendar is big step in the right direction. A few more customer examples like this and a lot of CIOs will look at Google with fresh eyes.

Comments Off

I spent some time yesterday at Salesforce.com’s Dreamforce event and was amazed at how much money Salesforce had spent on branding, banners, conference material, and a strange “No Software” mascot (photo courtesy of Chris and Becca).

The other thing that struck me was how stupid the Facebook announcement appears. Don’t get me wrong, the notion that Salesforce developers can now move their apps over to Facebook is nothing but upside for Benioff. If force.com applications are surfaced across both the web (see the Salesforce sites announcement) and Facebook developers should be that much more interested in force.com. For Facebook the goal is to fill in “areas like recruiting, productivity and project collaboration.” Still makes sense. Facebook is trying to grow and monetize its user base; more developers and new application categories will make that easier.

For users? You must be joking. Recruiting I’ll give you, but at best those apps will have a marginal impact. Productivity and project collaboration? Any CIO willing to let employees collaborate within Facebook deserves to be fired. The concept of employees collaborating inside a social, public application scared me when Worklight first started pushing the concept a year ago and still scares me today. Even if you give employees a safe secure bubble within Facebook, the ease at which employees can simply carry the conversation from secure to insecure, from private to public should keep CIOs and CTOs up at night. I’m a firm believer that context is critical in providing the right cues for employees and in governing behavior. Mashing up a secure and insecure contexts is asking for trouble.

Comments Off