News.blog: Google moving towards cloud computing

Google sees all enterprise trends pointing towards cloud computing, and it wants a piece of the action.

"The next 10 years of innovations are going to be in the cloud. Enterprise software is not going away, but there is a transition taking place," said Rishi Chandra, product manager for Google Enterprise.

Chandra, speaking at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston, laid out his case for why Google stands to gain more business customers in the coming years. Foremost is Google's strength in the consumer market, which he said will eventually translate into a stronghold in business computing.

"The cloud has arrived. It's not a question of when, but how fast it will arrive. Google runs itself off of Google apps," he said.

Chandra acknowledged that several well-established competitors, including Microsoft, Amazon.com, Salesforce.com and others are converging on the same market: delivering business applications via the Web with the same reliability and security as existing on-premise systems.

He downplayed competitive rivalries with Microsoft. "We are competitors with Microsoft. But we don't think about it in a competitive way. We are working to bring apps and a new way of using apps to the market today. We're all about end user focus," he said.

Microsoft, of course, has its own cloud-based plan. While chief software architect Ray Ozzie may worry most about open source, Google's larger ambitions are clearly on his mind. Microsoft has discussed some of its cloud computing plans under the Live Mesh umbrella. More details are expected later this year.

Chandra said four trends in the industry are playing to Google's strengths. First, he said Google sees technology innovation being spurred by the consumer market. The consumer world is more 'Darwinian' than the enterprise world. Users are unlikely to stick with an inferior product. "The cost of switching is zero in the consumer world. Millions and millions of testers in the consumer world help the enterprise market. As a result, users are getting better technology than the enterprise world. IM, search, VoIP, all have foundations in the consumer world," he said.