Google Apps Premier Edition

Two months ago I discussed the possibility for Google Apps to get a foothold in the Enterprise market and called for some changes for a few changes to their strategy to succeed in this marked. This week it seems that Google has moved a step closer to success in the enterprise marked by launching it's Google Apps Premier Edition. For $50 a year / account you'll get 99,9% uptime guarantee, 10GB e-mail account and an Extensible API for integrating your existing IT systems.

Allthough details are a bit thin it looks like Google also have dealt with my biggest objection against the enterprise using Google Apps and made ads "optional". But how cheap is 50$/year? For the commercial enterprise it is not bad. But for educational institutions I belive it is not cheap enough. It's for instance probably about three to five times the average price for a managed learning platform.

So my next prediction is that in a few months time we'll see a "Google Apps Education Premier Edition" that will give you no-ads, guaranteed uptime, limited support for 10-15$ a year/student :-)

I love customers

Suppliers on the other hand I have no fondness of. Before you jump to conclusions; no it's not because you make money of customers and bleed money to suppliers... There is more to it than that...

My work has recently started to involve more dealings with suppliers and slightly less interaction with customers. It's an important and probably necessarily change; our company is growing to the point that we need more expertise and help from the outside world. It has unfortunately also thought me a few valuable lessons about why you should not complain about your customers but care for them with great affection. Here's why:

1. Customers educate you, by listening to them you will learn how to evolve your business. Suppliers needs to be educated to understand your needs. And they do not always want to learn.

2. Great customers pick you, but facing potential suppliers you have to pick out the good once from a heap of rotten apples.

One of the most horrendous examples I can think of is the content switch technology we installed last year in our ASP environment. After a few months use we started experiencing really poor performance, affecting thousands of users. It took us several days of support calls, problem solving and sheer agony to discover that the reason behind this was that we had reached a cap of 100 new SSL transactions per second on the content switch. (Which we easily fixed by buying more licenses). What did our supplier do wrong here?

1. They did not educate us on how their hardware calculated the use of SSL transactions so our own calculations ended up far from target.
2. The supplier provided us with no monitoring capability to actually see the status of the current SSL transaction thus living us in a very blind spot.
3. There was a physical cap on the licensing without alarming or logging when the limit for the license was about to be reached.

What if our company billed our customers for a number of licences they couldn't calculate themselves? And had no tools for actually logging the number of licenses used? Or started rejected logins without a warning if a customer reached his/hers maximum number of licenses? We would been seriously bashed by our customers and potentially out of business. F5 on the other hand is one of the worlds leading suppliers of layer seven content switches...

"Web 2.0" and education

A lot of people with strong voices in the educational sector today preach "web 2.0" and social software as tools for modern education. If you look past the hype i believe that there is a lot to learn from social software such as flickr, myspace, digg and del.icio.us when building educational applications. Does this mean that the future software platform for education will be hosted by Google? Probably not, but that's a different discussion.

There are however two questions that should be raised to the evangelists of these applications in education.

1. How can we protect our students and pupils personal data and avoid giving away control over such data?

2. Is it OK to let our students and pupil be the subject of advertisement in order to take advantage of free services on the net?

Fell free to comment!

blackboard, patents, open source and more silliness

In the latest chapter of the drama unfolding after Blackboard patented learning technologies, breathing and the latin alphabet, our American friends has issued a new statement pledging not to sue open source software.

Why? Because some of the strong forces behind open source learning technologies are big educational institutions and customers of Blackboard. I imagine they have received an amount of flack on this issue not seen alike since The SCO group sued a group of linux vendors.

And here's another funny thing about the pledge; feel free to earn money on supporting, hosting, training, maintaining or developing open source solutions. Just make sure it's not propreitay, OK? So commercial vendors built around a business model of open source is good but if you propreitary they will sue you. Silly.

Oh, and the plea also goes for "Home Grown Systems", meaning software developed by educational institutions themselves. Cool, they even invented a new word to make sure that their customers get it; We will not bite the hand that feeds us.