JEFF: I'm Jeff.
SAM: I'm Sam, and we're part of the Google
Apps Education Team.
JEFF: So, a lot of people have asked us why we decided to
start building applications and really also to start
offering them an organizational or
institutional context to schools and businesses.
And what we saw was this trend evolving in the applications
space where consumer technology was evolving and
innovating very, very rapidly.
And so you look at the first instant messaging, the first
blog, the first wiki.
Video sharing, mobile technologies, virtual reality.
And a lot of this was really happening in
the consumer space.
And so we saw this increasing trend of user satisfaction, of
innovation, where things were moving very quickly and
consumers were very happy with the technology they had access
to at home.
And we went out and we talked to organizations, and we said,
so what does the world look like for you?
And they were really facing a variety of challenges.
And the first was an explosion of the volume of information
people were dealing with.
There was the number of emails, the number of
documents, was just increasing at an exponential rate.
And technology often wasn't keeping up.
So people were really struggling just to do simple
tasks and keep track of all the information they now had
at their fingertips.
The second real challenge for users was around
collaboration.
And whereas most of the applications we are using
today were built for personal productivity, a lot of the
challenges we face today are really about
collaborating in a group.
When I started trying to work with my team or my class, it
became really challenging.
And the best example of this is just
collaborating on a document.
If I'm in a class and working on a group project with four
of my friends, I might start with a document.
And I send it out to my four friends, and three of them who
are on the ball send me back some edits.
And I spend an hour or two combining the edits and
putting together version two.
I send that back out to everybody, and my three
friends spend some more time making some edits.
They send it back to me.
But I always have at least one slow friend.
My slow friend likes to come back and send me revisions
from two or three versions before.
And now I'm in a place where I'm just struggling to try and
bring together the work everyone has done.
This is just an example of technology that hasn't kept
pace with the real challenges facing users.
On the IT side, we saw a different set of challenges--
really about complexity.
There are solutions out here to many of these challenges,
but all of them are very costly and complex to deploy
and to manage.
Really a nightmare for an IT folks.
And so we often say, what does that environment look
like for you today?
And they say, well, we bought PCs, and there's some software
we put on there.
And then we started buying systems. Email systems,
directory systems, storage systems, mobile systems,
content databases, spam filtering.
And then, of course, once we bought all this stuff, we
realize it's never allowed to go down, as our president and
our students are going to Beijing and
Shanghai and Mumbai.
And so we go ahead and we buy a second one of absolutely
everything to make sure nothing can ever go down.
And then we spend our lives just going around and patching
and fixing and making sure everything works.
And Patch Day Tuesday rolls around, and we go again and
just fix everything.
And what this really meant to the institution was a lot of
money that was not being spent effectively.
We weren't effectively leveraging the time, the
energy, and the money we were investing in information
technology.
The other thing it meant for our users was that whereas we
had seen this increasing trend of satisfaction in the
consumer space, we saw a much leveler level of innovation
and satisfaction with the technologies we had
access to at school.
And so we at Google thought, we can really
help with this problem.
And if we can bring some of those Google technologies, the
consumer innovation, into this space, we can bring those
trends back together and help people be as happy with the
technology they have access to at school as they are with the
technology they have access to at home.
SAM: We want you to take this complex environment that
you've been managing and replace it with an environment
managed by an outside provider like Google.
This provides you with all the applications simply to you,
like utility, accessible from any internet connection, from
any device.
But this move is not without precedent.
50 years ago, companies and universities ran their own
power plants.
They had different voltages, currents, plugs.
You couldn't take a device from one and
use it anywhere else.
And people thought that
electricity was mission critical.
How could you allow anyone else to manage it?
Today, we wouldn't dream about managing our
own electricity plants.
What does this mean for you?
As an organization, we see too much IT time and effort and
money really spent on focusing on things that are not core to
your business, and focusing more on contextual services.
This is not effective for an organization.
And so basically, by moving to the Google model, you get to
focus on the things that are important to you-- the things
that are core to your organization
and that add value.
We see really three key benefits in the cloud
computing model.
The first is that you get to leverage the infrastructure of
the provider.
In Google's case, this means massive data centers built for
scalability, security, and efficiency.
We set out to build the environment that runs
google.com.
And one of my favorite antidotes is that when my
users want to see if the internet's up and running, the
site that they often go to is google.com.
The other key benefit of the cloud computing model is it
allows a new kind of real-time collaboration that you've
never been able to do before.
Take the earlier document example that
Jeff was talking about.
In this new world, the document sits in the cloud,
and everyone can be accessing and working on that document
and collaborating on it in a real-time environment.
The third key benefit is in the old world, you spent a lot
of time installing hardware, installing
and maintaining software.
But really, this model is all about innovation.
It's more about identity management.
You plug in once, and you get all the innovation delivered
to you in small packages more frequently.
So we consider ourselves a services platform, and we open
it up to a lot of APIs.
Some of these are for things like account management, for a
single sign-on, for mail migration.
And we also support open standards, which is really
important in our world.
JEFF: When people start talking about outsourcing
services and data, the first questions that they come to us
with are really around privacy and security of data.
I'd like to use a few examples to tell you how we here at
Google think about these critical issues.
The first example is my grandfather.
You can see him here.
He's a great guy--
WWII vet.
He still thinks that his money is best buried in the backyard
versus being in a bank.
So he actually puts it in a tin can and buries it under
one of the trees in his yard.
And he won't tell me which one, because he says he trusts
me, but not quite that much.
Now, most of us believe that our money is much safer in a
bank than it is buried in the backyard.
And we can get access to it from lots of places, whether
that's a banking center in London or the
ATM around the corner.
Another great example is really travel.
Most people feel safer driving than they do flying.
When statistics tell us that you're much more likely to
arrive at your destination unhurt taking a plane
than you are a car.
But there's just something about holding on to that wheel
that makes us feel in control and more safe.
And we think security of data is much the same.
The reality is that though while having that
infrastructure in-house makes you feel safe, a provider like
Google, who operates in a much larger scale, is able to
secure that data much better than you could yourself.
So the question is really about privacy.
What is Google doing with your data?
And I'll say four things to you about privacy that are
really commitments from Google.
First, we won't share your data.
There are some obvious exceptions to this rule
provided by common sense and the law, and I'll go through
those in a minute.
Second, we'll keep your data as long as you like.
We're not going to delete it because you haven't accessed
it in so long or edited the document.
On the other hand, if you want to remove your data, we'll
remove from all of our active servers, because if you don't
want a copy kept, we shouldn't be keeping one either.
And finally, we'll let you take your data with you
wherever you want to go--
whether that means exporting a document to Word or Excel or
taking all of your mail and calendar data with you to
another service, we're committed to helping you take
that with you wherever you'd like.
Now, there are a few exceptions to the first rule,
and I like to go through these calling them the fine print on
the big screen.
The first exception is the most
obvious: when a user consents.
If you asked for us to share your document or a calendar
with a couple of your friends or the entire world, we'll go
ahead and do that.
Second, sometimes we have to provide data to affiliates or
subsidiaries for purposes of processing.
A great example of this is when we provide data to Google
Ireland for purposes of processing in our European
data centers.
And sometimes, we have to provide data to third parties
for valid legal processes, enforcement of our terms of
service, to prevent fraud, or protect
against imminent threat.
If you'd like to know more about Google's privacy
policies, please visit google.com/privacy.
SAM: So what is Google Apps?
We start with the Google Apps platform, and then we add a
bunch of collaboration tools.
These include Google Docs, which is our word processing,
spreadsheet, and presentation tools; Google Sites, a
collaborative team working environment; and the Google
personalized start page, a personalized ramp-up to all
these tools that we talk about.
Then we add a bunch of communication tools: Google
Mail, Google Calendar, and Google Talk.
We also have a set of security and compliance tools that we
can add to the package for an additional cost. So what is it
that we give to education?
Well, Google Apps Education Edition is free for students,
faculty, staff, and alumni.
There's no advertising for faculty, staff, and students,
and we give you 6.5 gigabytes worth of storage--
and that's growing on a daily basis.
It's at your domain, and it comes with support 24 hours a
day, seven days a week.
We also give you access to those extensibility APIs that
we mentioned that allow you to integrate with your existing
system and build on top of these tools.
JEFF: We think Google Apps is a great set of tools to help
your students, staff, and alumni more effectively
communicate and collaborate.
SAM: It allows you to simplify your infrastructure and
leverage all the great innovations that
Google brings out.
For more information, please visit our website.