Google Waving Hello to the Enterprise

 

The application is supposed to be all that and a bag of chips. Its invitation-only release set off something of a frenzy, including a few phising scams. From initial reports, it's a Web-based client that allows customers to invite other users, and to drag and drop documents as well as clients from other communications tools, including instant messaging and e-mail. Here's a quick look at the interface:

 

 

If it does everything it's supposed to do, it could represent the first real challenge to traditional enterprise collaboration tools from Microsoft and IBM.

 

Wave is also being introduced at a time when enterprise customers are at last beginning to grapple with the notion of not just document storage and retrieval, but actual information management.

 

Unknown at this point, however, is what security measures are in place to allow people into one conversation without giving them more access than intended, nor how different versions of these documents are to be treated from compliance perspectives.

 

Ben Rometsch, director of British ISV Solid State Group, and one of the developers who got an early look, said that Wave offers the ability to "integrate with other services, like calendaring, and the shared authoring of documents."

 

But, he said, he is "still trying to figure out where the most benefit [of implementing the application] is going to come from."

 

Google is clearly at an inflection point in its attempts to penetrate enterprise IT shops, and its recent travails with Gmail and Apps haven't won it many plaudits. Customers also complain about a lack of responsiveness when there are problems, and while the same can be said of traditional systems vendors like SAP and Oracle, or Microsoft resellers, Google remains the outsider with something to prove. Its burden of proof might be unfairly high, but that's the price of insurgency.