Can we divine a company’s intentions by looking at the people they hire?
I was catching up on my blogroll, and one blogger noted that, Amazon’s S3 service “smells like” Werner Vogel. Mr. Vogel is a distributed computing expert that moved from academia to Amazon in 2004.
Let’s look at Google (because it’s fun to talk about them).
Some names I follow that have moved to Google: Joshua Bloch (key Java designer), Cedric Beust (BEA J2EE, Test-NG), Gregor Hophe (Enterprise Application Integration expert). Managing as much data as they do, they probably have a strong need of talent like this.
Focusing on Mr. Hophe… Enterprise application integration is an important area for Google, given the massive amounts of data and systems they likely use in their day-to-day activities. They probably need Mr. Hophe’s expertise for all their internal systems and data. Let’s assume, however, that Mr. Hophe’s employment was something more and we can use that as a tea leaf in our divining cup…
EAI is also the bread-and-butter for many financial and health-care institutions: dealing with legacy systems, disparate sources of data, operating on them, aggregating it all for analysis.
The enterprise market is also more lucrative than the consumer market. Public opinion is fickle and consists of many individual decisions, each adding some small revenue. For enterprises, one hopes for a few decisions, but they’re biggies, and generates revenue for a few years.
Perhaps Google, who apparently is working on some kind of EAI problem, will develop a remarkable new approach? After that, it’s a matter of monetizing it. I don’t think they’ll directly replace Oracle, IBM, Tibco, SAP, et al. Google favours novel, possibly niche, approaches to old problems, rather than faster, bigger iterations of old solutions.
Google already forayed into the enterprise space: the Google Search Appliance. I don’t know how successful it was to them, but it indicates an interest in the enterprise space. It also suggests that their approach to the enterprise space will involve prepackaged solutions, rather than software products you tinker with.
The best products are those where the creators had the same problem as the customers (i.e. dogfooding). Google already has an excellent presence in all organizations (what tech worker doesn’t Google?). They’ve demonstrated their technical competence everyday on the most demanding stage, the Internet. Let’s not forget Google’s mandate to “organize the world’s information”; the data in the enterprise space is even move voluminous than the consumer/web space.
Based on the talent that Google has, the potential prize ($$$), the current state of existing solutions (complex, laborious, unsubtle, expensive), and their own needs, it seems likely that Google is working on a solution to some kind of EAI problem that might be valued by others. I don’t imagine it’s something that they’re focusing a lot of attention on; perhaps it’s incubating slowly while Google does battle on the web front?
I do have a cautionary note, however. Google’s culture (internal and external) is quite unlike that of many enterprise organizations. Google may have the technical talent and the individual popularity, but I wonder how well-equipped they are at handling the political nature of enterprise deals. If their treatment of Wall Street is any indication, they’d better hire a special team to deal with the suits.
