Matthew Glotzbach, director of product management for Google Enterprise, says
corporate customers still need to become more comfortable with hosted application
delivery before it will really take off. Glotzbach sat down with Computerworld
during the AIIM International Conference last week to talk about Google
Inc.'s fledgling Google
Apps software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering and how the company plans to
compete with traditional application vendors like Oracle
Corp. and SAP
AG and with new hosted offerings from top vendors like Microsoft
Corp.

Are corporate IT managers customers ready to trust hosted products with
their data?

We have tens of millions and hundreds of millions of users who trust us with
their data, be it search history, Gmail or credit card information. It's easy
to believe that our systems for managing and storing data are going to be as
secure, or in most cases more secure, than your average enterprise system. It's
really more of an emotional argument than anything else. This cloud is an intimidating
and somewhat abstract idea. We're quickly dispelling this myth that these cloud
based or services-based applications are somehow lightweight versions of traditional
apps. Because these apps are connected up in the cloud, they facilitate a collaboration
and sharing that is nearly impossible for traditional apps.

How do you get disgruntled packaged software users to consider hosted apps?


Cloud-based applications are just built differently. One benefit is ongoing
maintenance support and upgrades. They're not thought of as versions. You're
not on version 1 or version 2 -- there's a constant stream of updates. From
an IT perspective in a large enterprise, it's even less about the cost associated
with that than it is the hassle. It's difficult to upgrade to the latest version
of some application. You may have customized so much that upgrading to the new
version is nearly impossible. That is definitely one thing we hear a lot. There
are just things you can do in a cloud model that you can't do with traditional
software. On the e-mail front, we give 25GB of storage to our business users
and 6GB to consumers. That's just not something you can do with Lotus Notes
or Microsoft Exchange.

Why aren't hosted products widely used in large organizations today?


One peace of mind that IT departments have when they run things in house is
that they can go look at the servers and hug them. When we move to a cloud model,
there's an arm's length attachment along with all the benefits. You can't point
at the server that's holding

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