SaaS Week

It seems Capgemini's decision to support and offer Google Apps has sent ripples through the media and put a spotlight on the enterprise readiness of Google Apps Premier Edition. John Soat of InformationWeek's CIOs Uncensored weblog said that the Capgemini announcement meant that maybe more CIOs should take Google seriously as a business software provider. Soat originally commented on a Burton Group report questioning the enterprise-readiness of Google's SaaS tools and pointed out that most CIOs might find Google's limitations "limiting," but Soat points out that the Capgemini move gives a new level of credibility to Google although questions still remain about functionality and enterprise support.

Reporter Paul McDougall, also of InformationWeek, reported on a Gartner bulltein in which Gartner analyst Ben Pring predicted that the Capgemini/Google deal would further boost the SaaS market in general, writing, "Capgemini would not align itself with Google and risk upsetting its relationship with Microsoft if it did not sense among its customer base of large multinational corporations a genuine interest in Google's application initiatives."

CNET reported further on Microsoft's retort to the announcement, in which it urged users to ask themselves ten specific questions about Google Apps, scorning Google's history of releasing incomplete products as "beta." CNET quotes Ovum analyst David Bradshaw as saying, "Microsoft is paying (Google) the second most sincere form of compliment, in treating them as a serious rival."

ZDNet's SaaS blogger Phil Wainewright was skeptical of the announcement's importance, writing in a blog post yesterday that Google and Capgemini "just doesn't add up". Wainewright asserted that making Google Apps more mainstream by packaging it into the Capgemini model was unlikely to sway any mainstream-inclined enterprise away from Microsoft Office, and that companies inclined to deploy Google Apps would not want it "all smothered in consultant goo."