Thoughts from Atmosphere at Google – +SiliconANGLE

Google Atmosphere event at the Googleplex in Mountain View, California is the company’s big enterprise CIO event. This is the event where Google parades out their top executives and promotes that they indeed know what they are talking about in the enterprise.

Google is a growing enterprise vendor and compared to the likes of IBM, EMC, and HP they are still in kindergarten. That being said Google is making big strides specifically the opportunity with the cloud and mobile. Google has all the elements to compete on value with services.

Google hitting all the “table stakes” marks on enterprise with their 99.9% uptime messaging plus their customer satisfaction ratings are increasing. Both metrics are critical for to compete in the enterprise. One glaring hole in the program is the absence of big data. Google is one of the shinning examples of a company that is a “big data” company. Real time analytics is a big mega trend and in big time demand from enteprises. Last week at Hadoop World we saw the big push of big data going mainstream.

Google Positioned Well – Very Good Management Team

+Dave Girouard and +Bradley Horowitz both used to work together and watching them sit next to each other yesterday reminded me on how young Google is in the enterprise relative to the likes of HP, IBM, and EMC etc.. Dave and Bradley are smart and young and make up a great team. In addition, Google has added a slew of other smart people from across the company including newly hired social media and enterprise guru Louis Gray to drive Google +.

What was refreshing was the coolness of Google. CIOs that were in attendance were visibly excited by the Google message. When I got home it hit me. Google is cool because they are a tech powerhouse at least on the consumer side. Combine their technical chops with a very strong brand, the Google message is translating to large enterprise buyers not just small medium sized business and education buyers.

Case in point on the Google coolness. CIOs were taking turns getting photos on the street view bike. It was like watching kids at the boardwalk – pure fascination. Oh yeah, I’m writing this post on Google + on my new Chromebook that they gave away for free. Turned it on with no setup it’s up and running. That’s cool as far as I’m concerned. Disclosure: this is a evaluation unit :-)

Although Google’s messaging is not as advanced as the big boys their position is solid as a new player on the enterprise block. Putting it all together has been Google strategy for this year’s atmosphere and it is about collaboration and video. The keys for Google enterprise has been a series of product upgrades and launch of Google +. I expect Google + to be a big part of the enterprise strategy anchoring the “Cloud Mobile Social” direction.

While the mainstream press talks about Google + as a Facebook wantabee, Google is rolling it out hard to all consumers – including business and education. Forget Facebook Salesforce.com is scared out of their minds.

Google + is a Salesforce.com killer.

Overall quite impressive and it will be intereseting to see if +Amit Singh has what it takes to lead Google Enterprise. I like the Girouard Horowitz combo.

Good luck Google we’ll cover all the angles.