Below is the summary of opening remarks by Dave Girouard - Google Inc. - President, Google Enterprise at a recently held Technology Leadership Forum. Clearly, Dave’s remarks suggest to me that while MSFT may have won the desktop battle, its Google to watch out for in the online battlefield. One thing is for sure - with the envelope of efficiency being pushed further and further, it’s the consumers who will be the ultimate gainers.
On Cloud Computing
It's definitely gotten to a hype level in the press, and it can mean a lot of things. Generally speaking, it means accessing technology through a browser and having nothing to install on the client, nothing to install in your data centers. It can be used probably to describe consumer markets as well, and in some way probably describe all of Google. But I think a lot of the context for cloud computing is around business computing and enterprise computing. I tend to break it into two related but different segments. One really is applications, sometimes referred to as Software-as-a-Service. And then platform, or infrastructure, or Platform-as-a-Service or Infrastructure-as-a-Service--call it what you will--where basically you allow the developers or companies or third parties to build applications on top of infrastructure. So I think--and there's many, many flavors of that. So it covers a lot of ground, and that's a lot, I think a lot of people are using it conveniently to describe almost anything they do these days, which is probably the sign of ultimate hype in a term.
On what’s most attractive to Google?
On Cloud Computing
It's definitely gotten to a hype level in the press, and it can mean a lot of things. Generally speaking, it means accessing technology through a browser and having nothing to install on the client, nothing to install in your data centers. It can be used probably to describe consumer markets as well, and in some way probably describe all of Google. But I think a lot of the context for cloud computing is around business computing and enterprise computing. I tend to break it into two related but different segments. One really is applications, sometimes referred to as Software-as-a-Service. And then platform, or infrastructure, or Platform-as-a-Service or Infrastructure-as-a-Service--call it what you will--where basically you allow the developers or companies or third parties to build applications on top of infrastructure. So I think--and there's many, many flavors of that. So it covers a lot of ground, and that's a lot, I think a lot of people are using it conveniently to describe almost anything they do these days, which is probably the sign of ultimate hype in a term.
On what’s most attractive to Google?
With our products, stuff that we refer to as Google Apps, which is essentially a set of applications that we build for, not just for consumers, where they started, but now for businesses of all sizes and flavors. We refer to that suite as Google Apps. That's our application play, and there's a lot we expect to do with that to expand on it, build on it, more functions, more features, occasionally more applications on the application side. And then the infrastructure side, we're actually doing very little today. We're getting started. We have what we call App Engine, which is in essence a way for developers to build applications on top of Google infrastructure. And it's only a very simple preview release. It's not really a commercially offered application or platform today. But generally speaking, we want to offer over time more and more ways for companies and developers to take advantage of the computer infrastructure that Google has. And eventually we would envision a day where software developers would have the same access to our infrastructure like Google engineers do. And that has a lot of great potential, and it's going to take a lot of work to get from here to there. So we have interest in both. We're a lot further along in applications than we are in infrastructure today.
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