BPOS - Some Observations (Nearly There)

I now have an almost fully working BPOS Trial;

Users can now access Sharepoint and LiveMeeting and Admin can now access SharePoint. I have not done anything different so I am assuming someone has fixed something at the back end. For some reason I still can't administer LiveMeeting & for both LievMeeting and SharePoint my Admin user gets challenged to select from a list of non-existing certificates for authentication.

To get this far has taken one week and intervention from several people at Microsoft.

Once in, the service does look very corporate, the UI is for sure more slick than Google Apps. This will appeal to enterprise users. The product is tied nicely to on-premise MS environments - less so for non-MS environments, as you would expect. I can see the more conservative enterprises embracing this technology - BPOS provides a step-change in working practices and some cost reduction and does not cause the kind of disruption and radical transofrmation in working practices that Google Apps engenders.

I will be really interested to see how much the adoption of this technology is determined by age; my gut feeling is that Generation X/Y (1971 - present) may be more inclined to go the disruptive Google path whilst the older generation may go with the security blanket of Microsoft! I know this is a generalisation but I wonder if we might see this as an underlying trend?

I suspect that long-term the battle for the clouds is going to be fought in the schools, colleges and universities; people tend to stick with what they know so capture this market and you secure your future (to an extent).

I also wonder how big a role App Engine will play in this decision. Many enterprises use MS for Email & Office but use Java for Apps and Services; with the tight integration between Apps and App Engine, I wonder if this will influence many enterprises to embrace the Google Apps product as part of their App Migration to the Cloud strategy. I certainly know of organisations already who are doing precisely this.

For my part, I am going with Google because they offer the more Open and more Standard platform. That and I deployed Google Apps for my company in one hour, it took me seven days to get to (almost) the same point with BPOS; and Google Apps is (significantly) cheaper, and Google Apps offers more functionality, and I love the different way of working and the different interface that Google offers. BUT most of all, I love just how powerful App Engine is (just as soon as a few niggly limitations are lifted); App Engine is where enterprises are going to see real savings, well beyond what Apps / BPOS can offer and not just savings but new opportunities for developing services that have been to expensive and to difficult up to now.