[..] Gmail as an Enterprise Dashboard(Krishnan Subramanian) [..]
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Google is far away from being a success in the Enterprise 2.0 segment. In fact, if you ask many pundits in the field about Google's enterprise offerings, they may even laugh at it. However, Google is slowly, but steadily, moving towards developing Gmail, its browser based email application, as the dashboard for Enterprise 2.0.
Pundits may argue that the product looks amateurish. They may claim that enterprises are not comfortable with mashups unlike how the consumers are embracing them right now. They may even say that enterprises may not want a purely browser based environment. All these arguments may be completely valid at this point in time. But, as I argued before, we cannot underestimate Google. As it is the case with many SaaS vendors, they release early and keep on iterating for a long time before a product matures into a truly enterprise ready product. Google may not be able to convince enterprise community right now to use their SaaS offerings but it could eventually get there. It may not happen overnight as it is the case with any new trend in the enterprise segment. But they are positioning themselves to be ready once the enterprises loosen themselves up and become SaaS ready, either with further maturation of SaaS products or due to a much deeper economic recession.
Recently, Google announced the availability of Google Calendar and Google Docs integration into Gmail through their Gmail Labs gadget. They also announced the availability (pretty soon) of SMS text messaging through Google Talk gadget inside Gmail. Last week, they announced a new browser plugin that will allow users to do video and voice chat through the Google Talk Gadget in the newer version of Gmail. These gadgets make Gmail a powerful dashboard and the web browser a powerful platform for the enterprise users. I expect them to be integrating Google Sites into Gmail in the future. I also want to point out that it is now possible to add any Google gadgets, including those developed by third party vendors, to Gmail. Who needs expensive Exchange Server and Sharepoint Server when you can have similar capabilities within a browser for a fraction of its cost? Before people jump on me for this assertion, I want to highlight the fact that I am talking about what could happen in the future than the current state of Google SaaS products.
Google's voice and video chat integration is right now available for Windows and Mac and I hope that it is available for Linux pretty soon. It should be noted that this video and voice integration is done using open standards for communications like XMPP, RTP and H.264. This implies that anyone can build an application that could interoperate with Google voice and video chat. Technically, it means that we can do voice and video chat from almost any of the SaaS applications in the market. This is a powerful feature that could change the enterprise collaboration upside down, leading to browser being the only major "infrastructure" enterprises need to implement on their side. The way enterprises do IT is definitely going to change and Google is positioning itself to be a major player in the Enterprise 2.0 segment.
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