Google and the Cuculus Strategy

October 2008 was a period during which Google Apps and Gmail users encountered downtime. No online service can be available 24/7 unless users pay for the additional hardware and infrastructure required to keep a mechanical device and services provided by telecommunication vendors in redundant, hot failover assemblies. Google’s SLA for Google Apps and Gmail guarantees that service outages will be less than 45 minutes each month or when user error rate exceeds five percent measured on the server side of the system the customer uses. You can read the legalese for the Google SLA at google.com/apps/intl/en/terms/sla.html but take an attorney to lunch when you work through the document. Google’s lawyers are more syntactically challenged than Google’s sales professionals.

The second development was the addition of Google Analytics to Google Apps for the enterprise. Google has provided a range of analytical tools for its advertisers and consumer search customers since Google bought Urchin Software in March 2005. In November 2008, Google added analytics for its Apps service. The enterprise customer can use Google Analytics to determine how many authorized users reviewed a particular Google document or to cross-tabulate users, content and time. Most organizations lack even basic tools for figuring out what an employee does with content. The Google Analytics for Apps creates a new, compelling feature that is easy to use and essentially a free add-on to the enterprise license.

Let’s step back. What is Google doing with those different initiatives?

My research suggests that Google is turning flocks of Cuculi loose in the enterprise. The idea is that the clever Cuculi get into an organization. When the organization discovers a Google product, the Cuculi proliferate more Google products and services, which are useful, competitively priced and able to compete with other vendors’ offerings.

The Cuculi’s behavior explains some of Google’s enterprise strategy for 2009. The company wants to lay its product eggs in organizations already dominated by enterprise giants like IBM, Microsoft and Oracle. With the Google eggs in those companies’ nests, it is only a matter of time for the new Google products and services to hatch and hopefully flourish in an organization’s ecosystem. Google’s hatchlings will constrict the "food supply" of its competition.

I know the Cuculi analysis is far removed from Google’s software and information services. But in 2009, Google will become a much larger presence in organizations precisely because of its ability to use tactics that don’t match up to the received wisdom for enterprise sales. A company like Microsoft may find that its best customers are using Google services because they are economical and useful. IBM may realize that it has been keeping Google’s product eggs warm inadvertently because IBM sees Google as a partner, not a competitor.

What’s the outlook for 2009? That’s an easy question. More of the same from Google. Google will continue to attack its competitors with its Cuculi play. Google will make headway in the enterprise market. The company’s unconventional techniques are unexpected and difficult to thwart. For example, a company that uses Google’s free online translation system is acting in a rational manner. Online translation is no threat to the likes of IBM, Microsoft or Oracle, or is it?

One final point: "Do Google’s competitors recognize the threat that Google poses to incumbent vendors’ revenues?"

In a word, "Nope."

I don’t think the light bulb will go on until some established enterprise software vendor wakes one morning to the festive song of Cuculi in the server room.