Google derides 'dinosaur' system integrators

Google has hit out at old school system integrators and described them as “dinosaurs” who are out of touch with growing customer demands for more cloud-based products. Mountain View’s head of EMEA partners at Google Enterprise, Peter Lorant, was speaking at Channel Expo in Birmingham yesterday, where he attempted to woo more …

[Anonymous Coward]

Translated...

To me this reads, "We've invested so muhc money in this that if coud computing doesn't take off we're going to look like a right bunch of wallabies ... so we're going to try every and any tactic to get people over to cloud computing including insulting their inteligence or popping around their office with a sawn off."

[Anonymous Coward]

Waffle

"you can’t do anything unless you call your IT administrator" Could that be because your IT administrator is qualified, entrusted and empowered to ensue the company is in compliance with data laws, has important data backed up and is aware of what is where?

Google Apps is great for small companies who don't want an IT overhead and big companies who host their own (although they'll still have an admin).

[Anonymous Coward]

Err...

I can't see any half competent company wanting to stick all their IT 'in the cloud', it's not secure and it's not reliable as Google have proven several times in the last few months.

[Anonymous Coward]

two magic words

When applied by salesman to CIO: "everyone is".

[Anonymous Coward]

@Anonymous Coward

Your fears are not unfounded.

So long as there is any form of unreliability in the connection between the dumb terminal and the cloud, no one is going to risk it. It only takes one weak link in the chain and business comes to a grinding halt. Would any business put its very ability to do business in the hands of a telecoms company that would then have carte-blanche to hike the bandwidth prices?

it is only resulting in more traffic on the digital highway and now that all the all-you-can-eat packages are gone, (which is perverse as we're all being fitted with faster optical lines) it is only going to cost more and jam up the Internet. I had a hard enough time trying to watch ITV catch-up the other night which was stuttering like crazy ... probably because of someone in my beighbourhood downloading the latest movie.

With every company and his dog wanting us to move to on-demand video and movies over IP, playing 3D games over the Internet on a remote server, basically living every aspect of our lives on the Internet ... the bandwidth that optical links will deliver will already be eaten up and there will be no black fiber left anywhere in the UK network.

The cloud as a mass market solution doesn't work; can't work; won't work. End of. And if I'm wrong, I'll buy a hat with the sole purpose of eating it.

This is merely the only way that software companies have left in order to exert any form of control over their licence income and beat the pirates, but the only option they will have to make the thing work is if they stop selling the silver discs.

The only way this would work is if there was a major change in the way that the Internet is delivered and charged for.

[Sitaram Chamarty]

cloud is good only if...

...the service is more valuable than your data.

i.e., or most of us, cloud == cloud cuckoo land

[Gareth]

@Michelle Knight

"...the bandwidth that optical links will deliver will already be eaten up and there will be no black fiber left anywhere in the UK network. The cloud as a mass market solution doesn't work; can't work; won't work. End of. And if I'm wrong, I'll buy a hat with the sole purpose of eating it."

Isn't that like saying, in 1900, that there can't possibly be more than 100 cars because they'll use up all the available roads?

Assuming bandwidth follows the same Moore's Law which has held up quite well over the past 50 years, there'll be no Great Bandwidth Shortage any time soon...

[Goat Jam]

Bandwidth Shortage

Gareth: "Assuming bandwidth follows the same Moore's Law which has held up quite well over the past 50 years, there'll be no Great Bandwidth Shortage any time soon...:

If that is the case, why is it that ISPs are incessantly whining and introducing more and more restrictive caps on their poor suffering users?

[Peter Holgate]

@Gareth

So you're one of the lucky naive b'strds who have never had their network service fail.

[Anonymous Coward]

Familiar pitch

This sounds to me like pretty much the same pitch that was used to sell the desktop PC into business (i.e. going direct to management, and pitching 'IT' as the problem / bottleneck getting in the way, that the vendor can solve with their magical solution that makes thinking go away).

And while I'm sure a lot of businesses could throw out their lovely integrated applications and run everything on a bunch of Google spreadsheets, just like plenty of small businesses are run on Excel, it is rather glossing over the fact that doing line-of-business apps is very different from producing general purpose office software.

(And for what it's worth we've been pitching hosted apps & software-as-a-service to clients for over a decade, and most of the time they always suspect it's a ruse for us to make more money than if they bought the software and ran it on their own kit).