Google Continues Its March Into the Enterprise

By David Salyers 

Today Google announced its new Cloud Platform Partner Program, which aims to help partners like us design, develop and manage cloud-based solutions on the Google’s Cloud Platform.  As a company that’s worked in the Google ecosystem for the last six years, it’s great to not only see the advancements in the platform itself, but also how Google supports their enterprise partners. 

When we first started building solutions for customers (and ourselves) on the Google Apps platform many years back, it was mainly limited to gadgets that extended Google Apps in various ways. Then when Google App Engine was introduced, we were one of the first companies to build a highly scalable, enterprise application and have built many since.

As a technology-enabled services firm, we build custom applications on Google Apps and the Google Cloud Platform and implement Google Apps within large enterprises. In the last six years, we’ve moved more than 1 million users to Google’s services. Through these projects, we saw a great opportunity to create reusable assets that speed implementations and extend Google Apps in new and creative ways which led to two stand-alone assets that companies can buy even without using our services. For example, our Cloud Sync solution lets users sync Google contacts and calendars with Salesforce.com, and our CloudFactor solution, which brings contextual information from cloud apps like Salesforce.com, LinkedIn and Twitter directly into Gmail. 

Since we’ve made these products available on the Google Apps Marketplace, they’ve been used by tens of thousands of users across hundreds of companies.  This attests not only to the power of the Google Cloud Platform, but also the value of Google’s channel programs. We couldn’t have this level of visibility without their help.

Appirio has always been big believers in Google’s Enterprise solutions, and their Cloud Platform keeps getting better.  For example, at the recent I/O conference Google introduced a few key things that should prove very valuable to us and our customers. These include:

• The EU location for App Engine
• The Google Compute Engine for fast, scalable virtual machines running on Google’s infrastructure
• The App Scripts updates, especially the new standalone editor for creating, editing and publishing scripts; the ability to create and store scripts in Google Drive; and the ability to distribute scripts as web apps in the Chrome Web Store.
• The next version of the Drive SDK

Google’s Cloud Platform products enable customers to implement:

• Cloud app solutions, such as mobile apps, social apps, business process apps, and websites, using Google App Engine and Google Cloud SQL.
• Cloud storage solutions, such as high-end backup and recovery, active archiving, global file sharing/collaboration, and primary SAN/NAS, using Google Cloud Storage.
• Large-scale computing solutions, such as batch processing, data processing and high performance computing using Google Compute Engine.

Big data solutions, such as interactive tools, trend detection and BI dashboards, using Google BigQuery and Google Prediction API.

When you combine these technologies with the power of a crowdsourcing community like CloudSpokes, the possibilities are practically endless. In the last several months, we have run dozens of Google-related development challenges for the 40,000 developers in CloudSpokes, which have resulted in many creative and useful solutions.  For example:

• An Opportunity Close Predictor that uses the Google Prediction API to predict when sales opportunities will close
• A Google App Engine FTP Service that makes it easy to move files in and out of Google Big Table
• A Mass Gmail Attachment Downloader that allows users to download all the attachments from multiple e-mail messages at one time
• A Gmail Migration Help Desk app that allows agents to monitor the status of users’ migration from Microsoft Exchange to Google Apps and Gmail.
• An Android Admin App for Salesforce.com that allows administrators to easily perform common functions even when they are away from their desks
• A Swap Google Doc Ownership application that re-assigns ownership of all Google Doc documents and folders owned by a user
• An Evernote to Google Docs integration that makes it easy to export notes from your Evernote account to Google Docs
• A Google Calendar Free/Busy lookup app that allows Salesforce.com users to find good meeting times based on people’s Google Calendars.

Combining the cloud with the crowd proves out just how transformative these two paradigms can be – especially when companies as innovative as Google are involved.

Cloud: The Ultimate Level-Playing Field

By Sal Partovi (@spartovi)

What would you do, say, if you were the manager at large public facility and were faced with a ever growing problem of “spillage” in men’s restrooms? What would you change? It’s fairly safe to assume that those of us with an engineering mindset would approach the problem from the technology side - it’s likely the only part of the equation we’re confident we can change. We might think that we can’t make the ‘fellas pay attention, but we can create a better urinal. Perhaps if it had a deeper bowl, or was made of a different material, or...

Yet a manager in a large airport in Amsterdam was able to engineer a solution with very minimal cosmetic changes to the men’s room. Minimal changes, that led to massive changes in human behavior: “‘spillage’ on the men’s-room floor fell by 80 percent”.

The change was an etched fly in the bottom of each urinal. It gave the men something to aim for, created engagement, and drastically changed the user behavior with the system.

What is The Equation?

As stated above, “[technology is] likely the the only part of the equation we’re confident we can change.” That equation is the most basic equation we as technologists deal with: (The Solution) = (The Technology) + (The User’s Behavior). In the past the tech industry has been largely focused, blinded even, by one side of that equation. We call products “solutions” even though products don’t “solve” anything until someone comes along and uses them correctly.

Physical technology has a natural engagement loop. Take a glass of water for example. You can hold a glass of water in your hand, feel its weight when it’s full, hear the sound it makes when it hits something. These items naturally create an engagement loop with the user. Today’s business software however often does not (or does so only in the most basic of functions). How do we change that?

Enter Gamification

“Gamification is the process of using game mechanics and game thinking in non-gaming businesses to engage users and to solve problems.” Source

This year has proven itself to be a breakout year for enterprise gamification, and Appirio was fortunate enough to attend gamification’s premier event last month, The Gamification Summit. Gabe Zichermann and the GSummit team did an astounding job rounding up speakers from all corners of the gamified world. To give you an idea of the varying speakers and topics, here are a few of our favorites and links to related content where available:

• Nadya Direkova, Game Mechanic and Sr. UX Designer at Google (slides | video)
• Dan Porter, former OMGPOP! CEO, now VP Mobile at Zynga (creator of DrawSomething)
• Chamillionaire, Grammy-winning Rapper (pic)
• JP Rangaswami, Chief Scientist at Salesforce (blog)
• Andrea Kuszewski, Robopsychologist at Syntience Inc. (slides)
• Nicole Lazzaro, President of XEODesign (creator of the first accelerometer game for the iPhone) (slides)
• Jeff Atwood, Founder and CEO of Stack Overflow (related blog post)

Gamification can be applied broadly in a business. It can be used to rethink design processes, customer support, employee retention and much more. It’s been on our radar here at Appirio for a while now. We are currently live on an internal deployment of Badgeville for our employees as a replacement for our incentive compensation program. We wanted to incentivize people toward specific objectives we're trying to achieve as a company - and be able to change those incentives across the entire organization in real-time. As well, we are also in the midst of an external deployment of Badgeville for CloudSpokes, our developer community, as a way to not only incentivize participation but to better catalog achievements for top contributors. More on that to come in future posts.

Why “Gamification”? What does this new buzzword bring to the table that design or UX does not? Back to the etched fly example above, it’s thinking about the user in a deeper way. Creating systems that encourage optimal behavior by making it something the participant wants to do. Kathy Sierra explains with utmost elegance:

“Don’t focus on what the user will think about the product, focus everyone around you on what the user will think about himself as a result of interacting with it”.

Cloud as a Catalyst

Why is this concept of focusing intently on the user’s feelings and thoughts when interacting with a system gaining so much traction? The same can be said for the social revolution - what is causing this sudden shift to the user?

It’s the cloud, and the rise of user-focused websites like Amazon, Google, Facebook, Salesforce, Reddit, and Twitter that are the catalyst for this change. While gamification, in and of itself, is not specific to "cloud", it's certainly showing up in SaaS-based products a lot more quickly than it ever could in non-cloud technology. Here are a few examples of how the cloud provides some much needed flexibility for enterprises:

• Vendors can rapidly introduce new features. For example, see Salesforce’s recent introduction of "Chatter Influence" user metrics
• Product UIs are primarily web-based and therefore able to be mashed up easily
• Products are open enough to participate in web-based integration protocols like Oauth, providing a simple way to publish and interact with protected data
• Product APIs are open and based on modern standards like REST, allowing the access of named resources through a single consistent interface

The cloud provides many benefits from a more easily consumable subscription cost, multi-tenancy and a simplified outsourced infrastructure, but perhaps the key industry-changing aspect of the cloud is the shift in The Equation. Less focus on “technology”, more focus on “users”. Instead of being bogged down in the performance metrics of the latest Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud X2-2 box, enterprises can take a look into how they can architect business transformations that enable their constituents to succeed, and enjoy every moment of it. In the light of the cloud, we’re all going to have to. When the underlying technology is abstracted, it’s going to be the ability to create compelling, fun-to-use products that differentiates.

Are you currently exploring gamification in your business? Are you adamantly not doing so? Either way, we’d love to hear from you.

Can an iPad Really Replace your PC? Kevin Says Yes.

By Michelle Swan

There is no hiding from them – iPads are everywhere. They are everyone’s favorite conference giveaway, we see our colleagues breaking them out with glee in meetings, and companies ranging from SAP to General Mills are rolling out thousands of tablets to employees around the world.

Gartner estimates that by the end of 2016 there will be 665 million tablets in use worldwide - growing at almost 100 percent annually. Compare that to the average 4 percent growth that analysts expect for PCs.  Many of our own customers are investing heavily in mobile initiatives as a way to improve business processes from executive reporting to closed loop marketing, and they’re already seeing dramatic results. 

It’s no wonder that it seems like tablets are taking over the enterprise. But can an iPad really replace a computer as you go about your day-to-day job? The debate rages online, but some mobile warriors like Appirio’s own Kevin Dodson say it is possible.

Kevin leads Appirio’s mobile services practice and spends the majority of his time working with customers like BMC, DexOne and Kindred to guide and implement their own mobile initiatives. He rarely carries a laptop these days and says he can be just as productive with an iPad and a few key accessories.

Hear from Kevin directly in this video he created for Appirio’s own employees.



While tablets might not be a laptop replacement for the majority of enterprise workers, it might happen sooner than we think. The proliferation of new productivity apps for tablets, the rate at which enterprise applications are moving to the cloud, and the growing awareness of mobile and user-centric design are creating a perfect storm that’s driving the tablet adoption even deeper into the enterprise.

And Kevin for one is excited.