Google And French IT House CapGemini Forge Ties
by
on September 10, 2007,
Google Apps, an online suite, has for months been positioned as an inexpensive collection of simple and useful utilities for (mostly) small business and educational institutions. Today it’s hoping to start expanding its client base in a big way.
The Mountain View-based company behind the series of products has announced CapGemini as major partner in the delivery its solutions to businesses big (some very big) and small. The announcement effectively thrusts the calendar-email-word-processor-spreadsheet-etc. concoction straight into a world in which business-to-business and corporation-client ties aren’t tallied only in the thousands, but on occasion even the millions. And we of course can't forget to mention that the news also brings Google one step closer to competing almost directly with the monopolistic mainstay of the productivity market, Microsoft Office.
You must now be wondering why, of all the enterprise-oriented software suites of the world, CapGemini chose to partner with Google to help supply more and more businesses in the corporate world with its Apps suite. The answer, simply enough, is all about teamwork.
For years, the French IT consulting company chose IBM and later Microsoft to supply its employees with productivity solutions. But it recently found that it has been promoting individual productivity with the software it’s delivered to clients.
CapGemini wants to change that. It recognizes today that the trend is to collaborate, and it sees the Google Apps suite as fundamentally structured to provide just such team-based networking.
The idea of both in-house and out-of-house collaboration (in terms of both remote networking as well as company-client interaction on the software level), has gained ground rapidly in the enterprise. It’s seen as a more intelligent and efficient method with which to further corporate growth, and so CapGemini has chosen to create this new partnership with Google to ensure it can provide solutions that fit that very criteria if necessary.
It’s important to note that, despite the largess commandeered by CapGemini in its field, this is but a small stone in a bucket all but overflowing with rocks labeled as Redmond’s, but if Google proves to be a hit among CapGemini’s clients in the months and years ahead, Microsoft will certainly have to hasten the migration of its own products and services to better fit the collaborative mold.
