Thursday, January 15, 2009

The Forrester Blog For Information & Knowledge Management Professionals

Another, and very different (compared with Guy Creese’s perspective), take on the GAPE reseller program news; check the full Forrester post for more details on the Google program.

What this means for information and knowledge management professionals:

  • WIM #1: Google is serious about making money with Google Apps Premier Edition. It still has a mountain to climb to earn enterprise credibility, but customers like Genentech, Avago Technologies, and a slew of universites can't all be wrong.
  • WIM #2: Google can make money at $40/user/year, which bodes well for the future. If Google were just scraping by at that price, they wouldn't be scrambling a battalion of resellers to meet demand. They can clearly make money at $40/user/year. Take note, email adminstrators, CIOs, information and knowledge management professionals, and the competition.
  • WIM #3: The Google Apps portfolio will just get stronger. How? Because these are value-added resellers. They have to be cuz nobody can live off of $10/user/year. To survive, they will have to extend the application and integrate Sites, Docs, Video, Talk,Gmail, and whatever else Google Gmail Labs dreams up into their own cloud-delivered products. Ipso facto: the ecosystem will invest; the product portfolio will improve.

Forrester benefit of the doubt: apparently approaching infinity.

Burton Group benefit of the doubt: not so much…

The Forrester Blog For Information & Knowledge Management Professionals

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