Posted by Scott McMullan, Google Enterprise Partner Team

I continue to be amazed at the pace of innovation and interest around gadgets in general, and Google Gadgets in particular. With thousands of Google Gadgets in the directory and the top gadgets getting tens of millions of pageviews per week, something is clearly working :)

So much so that yesterday we announced Google Gadget Ventures, a new pilot program designed to fund 3rd party gadget developers. This is a great way to help developers pursue the growing opportunities around gadgets.

Speaking of opportunity, to date, the majority of gadget development has focused on consumer or individual productivity use cases. We're seeing increasing interest in gadgets that access password protected information, often pulled from line of business applications behind a firewall.

Interest here is particularly strong amongst Google Apps users, since the Google Apps Start Page effectively gives organizations iGoogle on their own password protected domain.

For example, we're showcasing some of these "enterprise" gadgets in the Start Page category of the Enterprise Solutions Gallery. Entries include Appirio's gadgets for Salesforce.com and LimitNone's gadgets for corporate directories or internal RSS feeds.

If you're interested in developing gadgets, check out the gadget developer pages.

If you'd prefer to have someone create an enterprise gadget for you, there's a growing list of 3rd parties specializing in this type of development in the professional services category of the Enterprise Solutions Gallery.

Posted by Rodrigo Vaca, Channel Marketing Manager, Google Enterprise

This month, we passed the 9,000 mark for enterprise buyers of the Google Search Appliance and the Google Mini. That's a great start, but we want to reach out even farther, which is why we're embarking on a partnership with Ingram Micro. One of the largest global distributors of technology products in the world, Ingram has extensive reseller relationships in Europe, Asia and Latin America that will help us deliver the power of search behind the firewall to businesses of all sizes, more efficiently and at a larger scale than we could on our own.

In addition to having access to a rich network of more than 165,000 retailers and resellers worldwide, Ingram possesses core strengths in sales, reseller credit, marketing, technical support and logistics. And it has strong penetration into the small-to-medium business (SMB) and Government and Education (Gov/Ed) channels that complement our goal to offer great search technology to even more enterprise users, no matter their size, segment or location.

Dave Girouard, our VP and General Manager for Google Enterprise, puts it this way: “This relationship with Ingram Micro marks an important milestone in the evolution of Google’s enterprise search business, giving customers around the world better access to our products and support. With the global reach and efficient distribution of Ingram Micro, many more customers will be able to gain the benefits of Google search to their business.”

Both the Google Mini and the Google Search Appliance are available immediately to qualified Ingram Micro solution providers in the U.S.; there are plans for a phased rollout in other regions through 2007. To find out how to obtain a Google Mini or Google Search Appliance, contact us here or here.

Posted by Ryan Pollock, Product Marketing

As Vikaram noted on the Official Google Blog, today was a big day for Google Apps. We introduced some great new features. Email migration makes it easy to import your email from your company's existing IMAP email servers, and the shared address book makes it simple to email and share documents with people on in your organization.

Also, if you're still trying to convince your coworkers of the benefits of Google Apps, or maybe just to explain Google Apps to your mom, share this video with them.

Posted by David Bercovich, Product Marketing Manager

The first time people learn about the Google Search Appliance, they often remark, ‘I didn’t know Google makes hardware.’ Actually, to power the millions of searches and other products, Google builds and deploys LOTS of servers in datacenters all over the world.

With the Google Search Appliance, one of the most difficult engineering challenges was to take Google's excellent web search and make it work well in the Enterprise. Specifically, the Google Search Appliance integrates with a wide variety of security systems, content repositories and other enterprise applications. Doing this in a relatively small footprint to make it easier for customers to deploy is nothing short of amazing. The reason we chose the appliance route is that was the only way we could give our customers a true plug-and-play experience. Customers routinely tell us that they setup the Google Search Appliance or Google Mini in a matter of hours – which stands in stark contrast to more complex enterprise search systems.

Thousands and thousands of happy customers later, the market has spoken – enterprise search is an important business challenge and customers worldwide are increasing their investment in search.

Recently, we started working with Dell to manufacture the Google Search Appliance. This partnership enables us to focus more on the software side – which is our real value add. Additionally, Dell’s international reach is helping us make the Google Search Appliance available faster in markets around the globe.

So does this mean the popular (and playful) yellow appliance is going to be replaced by a more buttoned-down corporate server? As you can see in the ad below that Dell is running to showcase our partnership, the familiar yellow box was one of many customizations to the manufacturing process that insures that the Google Search Appliance will continue to be the brightest box in the data center!

Posted by Scott McMullan, Enterprise Partner Team

Phil Wainewright's recent How SaaS changes the SI universe post highlights some important points about the impact Software as a Service is having on professional services.

In interviews with Appirio and Bluewolf, two SI's that are both Google Enterprise Professional partners as well as Salesforce.com partners, he expands on some fundamental differences in project delivery and scope:

"This is typically a business with 30-60 day projects and the ability to show things to customers as they’re being developed, which is not the kind of engagement the traditional SIs are used to."

He goes on to reference Bluewolf's CEO Eric Berridge:

"Berridge said that the focus is very much on best practice business processes and getting close to users in agile development-style engagements where they can see the applications taking shape and see the effect of changes as they happen."

This agile, iterative model of delivery professional services exactly mirrors what customers love about the on-demand model. Namely predictable costs and timelines, transparency because it's easy to "take the taste test", and continual improvements based on direct feedback to the vendor. This is exactly in line with what I saw at JotSpot, and is indeed what we're seeing around Google Apps.

Disruptive? Yes. But I'm personally not counting out the big SI's in this transition.

The upside for SI's of all sizes is large:

1. More intimate interaction with the customer
   
2. More money to allocate to more interesting, higher-value projects
   
3. Predictable costs and an agile approach reduce risk to encourage even more experimentation and innovation
   

One slice of the pie shrinks, while the other grows. The only question is how fast folks want to start investing in the new model.

Posted by Kevin Gough, Sr. Product & Marketing Manager



...and eat it too. On Friday at our company-wide TGIF, we celebrated PC World naming Google Apps Premier Edition #1 on their list of The 100 Best Products of 2007. Google Apps beat out the Nintendo Wii, Apple TV, and the Slingbox Pro, further reinforcing the convergence between business and consumer technology. Internally, Google Apps is a collaboration between Google enterprise and consumer teams. It's great to see that it's paying off.