Small and Medium Enterprises have normally waited 3-5 years for technology to drift down to their level. Large enterprises would adopt some novel technology, like the relational database, and 3 years later it would be available to the SME market. This unlevel playing field went on for many years but started to level out with the introduction of the personal pc in the 80s. Ever since, the field has slowly been moving to level until recently. Now, it seems, the field is starting to tip again, but this time the SME is the recipient of much of the new technology, while the large enterprise must wait for the technology to trickle down to them. Why do I make such an outlandish claim? Why would I assert that large enterprises with their CIOs and CTOs, VPs and Directors of everything from Telecomm and Networking to Business Management Applications, why would I assert that they are going to have to wait for the next wave of technology while the SME has it up and running and benefits from its value? I just finished reading a very interesting article by Nick Carr, one of our guest webloggers, on the Rough Type channel, who makes the case in his article "Will Google Win the Enterprise?" that Google's strategy on the Enterprise is to seep into it by first becoming the choice of its information workers. As the information worker becomes more familiar with Google's products and services they will eventually bring them into the enterprise where they work and soon Google will be as omnipresent as Microsoft. Carr writes: This is a radical vision for the evolution of corporate IT. Rather than enter the enterprise through the CIO and his staff, Google is looking, Girouard implies, to bypass the IT Department altogether. It will simply go on providing an ever larger set of simple, flexible services, and it will leave it to individual workers and the business units they're part of to, in effect, cobble those services together into an entirely new corporate IT architecture.
This much I agree with. But then Carr goes on to make the point that Google is going to somehow replace the large IT vendors that are tied into these large enterprises: What I think Girouard is saying – and it’s consistent with the messages that come from his superiors – is that Google sees no point in competing head-on with IBM and SAP and Oracle and EDS for corporate accounts. It will let those vendors oversee the orderly decline of the old model of IT – the model that, it’s worth remembering, still accounts for all their profits – while the new model, the Google model, grows organically inside organizations.
This is where Carr and I part company. Google it seems to me is not interested in Accounts Payable transactions, like an SAP or Oracle. That's not its point. What is Google? In my mind it is the infrastructure of the next revolution in enterprise IT. Google represents the thousands, nay millions, of computers that are harnessed together in a huge massively parallel system, and this system represents the future of utility computing for the enterprise. In other words, Google will become an enterprise vendor in the future much like DTE, the local electric utility, is our electricity vendor. Google will not be supplying the lights and lampshades but the juice of the next shift in enterprise computing. It will be on their network, or very similar networks, that companies do everything from generate invoices to route telephone calls. So how does this affect the SME and their technology. Large enterprises made their choices back in the 90s when they selected SAP or Oracle, etc.. They are now wedded to their vendors for the foreseeable future. The amount of time and cash they have dropped on business applications and infrastructure that now looks archaic was monumental. They are not going to change now. The projections called for a 10 to 15 year return on investment and they are simply not there yet. But the SME now has the opportunity to get in the game and at a relatively low cost. On demand software as a service is ready to go today for the SME. These are products that are eventually going to be part of the Google network of computing utilities. If you're still looking for a replacement for the AS400 or a step up from off the shelf software don't make the same mistake that large enterprises made in the 90's. Take a look at the future and ask yourself if you can afford to keep a closed, proprietary system. Software as a service can both deliver the technology for your business requirements today and in the future. | 
