Procurement Intelligence Unit

No-one in the wider business world needs reminding that things are pretty tough out there at the moment and, despite tentative signs of a revival on both sides of the Atlantic, are likely to remain so for the foreseeable future.

Small wonder then that more and more companies are looking to, what in common parlance, has become known as “go Google”. If you’re based in New York, San Francisco, Boston and Chicago then the chances are that you’ve already come across the company’s latest Google Apps Campaign– a campaign which is hitting billboards across each city.

A quick click on the company’s website offers some persuasive rhetoric to those businesses which may still be undecided as to whether they want to join the “1.75 million businesses, schools and organizations (that) have gone Google”.

“Every morning, millions of people wake up to a very refreshing experience at work. They don’t see “mailbox is full” errors in their email. They don’t worry about backing up their data….” I could go on, but I imagine you’re getting the general idea.

There’s little doubt that “going Google” could save companies a considerable sum of money. As Paul Driscoll, CIO of Erith Group, succinctly put it in a recent webcast: “For a company like ours, adding the infrastructure that’s necessary to cover a lot of staff in a lot of places is very expensive – at £25 per user per year Google Apps just swipes away all that investment.”

With cost dominating the agenda, they’re the kind of figures with which it’s hard to argue, and if businesses no longer have to budget for IT infrastructure costs, expensive software upgrade costs and – possibly more crucially – day-to-day running costs, then the competitive advantage that Google Apps delivers is equally difficult to ignore.

Its scalability and flexibility is also a major selling point as Driscoll again outlined: “At the moment it’s all about cost and scalability. I can add 100 users in 10 minutes.”

The challenge Google faces, however, is to convince businesses to hand over some of their most valuable corporate data and – even during times as tough as this – that could still prove to be a hard sell.

An article in Fortune magazineas recently as last August, claimed that a number of IT directors were still loath to make the switch to Google Apps for a list of reasons common to all “cloud computing” providers – namely reliability, risks of storing employing records or trade secrets on another company’s servers.

Shoukruy Tiab, VP of IT at Jenny Craig, was asked if he was nervous about hosting sensitive corporate information on someone else’s server. His response? “Yes, even if it’s Google.”

Plans by the City of Los Angeles to replace its Novell GroupWise email and MS Office applications with Google Apps by the end of this year as already been heavily criticised by the LA Police Department, the city Attorney’s office, and public interest groups.

Nothing punctures public confidence quicker that the leaking of sensitive information. Twitter recently became the latest high-profile victim of hackers intent on bringing down some of the world’s most high profile targets. And with Google undoubtedly near the top of that list, it’s little wonder that some firms will still take some convincing before realistically floating the notion of cloud computing.