Google’s willingness to try anything combined with its web scale culture make it an unlikely traditional enterprise vendor – but Google is betting that “traditional” is not what today’s enterprises want or need. The result is an enterprise strategy that is impossible to compartmentalize yet unquestionably innovative.
Google’s Cultural Context
Peel away the layers, and at the heart of Google lies its search engine and the complementary advertising platform that to this day drives most of Google’s revenues. To create such massive tools, Google had to figure out how to build technology at scale and a culture to support it. This culture of web scale remains at the heart of the company.
“At Google we get how to build systems that scale to hundreds of millions of users,” says Greg DeMichillie, Director of Product Management at Google Cloud Platform. But there’s more to Google’s culture of scale than the infrastructure story itself. Everything they bring to market must leverage this scale, which means that everything they work on must have massive scale as a core enabler.
There is more to Google than scale, however. For Google, the flip side of this aspect of Google’s culture is their culture of innovation. “What we’re trying to do is innovate as fast as possible,” continues DeMichillie. “We’re trying to innovate on all levels of the stack.”
In fact, Google encourages every employee – Googlers, as they call themselves – to innovate. Not only are Googlers expected to spend a sizable chunk of their time on pet projects, but they love to run many of those pet projects up the flagpole to see which customers will salute.
Some ideas take off, others founder, and many find themselves in a seemingly never-ending beta state. True, there are products like Google Reader or iGoogle that gain a measure of traction, only to be pulled from the market. But many more ideas take off and remain lucrative, adding to Google’s already impressive bottom line.
Targeting Enterprise Developers
Google’s organizational focus on scale coupled with their try-anything innovativeness have led them to a leadership position in the cloud computing marketplace. The two platforms at the center of the Google Cloud Platform, the Google Compute Engine and Google App Engine, began as experiments that leveraged Google’s massive scale.
Today the platform is driving one prong of Google’s enterprise strategy: serving developers. “It’s all about meeting developers where they are,” says DeMichillie, by building tools that developers are comfortable with.
Jason Bloomberg will be covering next week’s CES conference for Forbes. Vendors at CES with disruptive offerings for the Internet of Things are invited to contact him at agility@intellyx.com.
Intellyx advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. As of the time of writing, none of the organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers. Image credit: M A Felton.
Read the entire article at http://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonbloomberg/2014/12/31/googles-three-pronged-enterprise-strategy/.
