MS Office and Google Apps – Bridging the Gap

The word of business intelligence could provide the perfect playground for Microsoft and Google to work together, providing a joint solution.

Even though many of us would be reluctant to admit it, we all love watching a great battle. There is something about witnessing to two opposing sides combating to the bitter end. Whether it’s the Yankees vs. the Red Sox, Obama vs. Clinton or even those two maniacs pulled over on the side of the road engaging in fisticuffs, consumed with road rage, we crane our necks to get a good eye-full of the action! It is with the same excitement that the Microsoft vs. Google story has remained high on the interest level of both consumers and corporations.

Many in the analyst and media communities thrive on focusing on the attention-grabbing element of this “presumable” battle between the Redmond and Mountain View-based companies, especially in the realm of their respective productivity suite offerings. Microsoft Office and Google Apps, when stacked up side-by-side are actually two very different beasts. Google has taken the “Software as a Service” (SaaS) approach to their offering and Microsoft has stayed true to its on-premise software.

So while the industry collectively salivates at the thought of Google being able to strike a dagger in the heart of the Microsoft behemoth, it seems as if Google is taking a calmer and less dramatic approach! Google has made it clear that they have no intention of trying to position Apps as a replacement for Office. Their message has been to utilize it as a compliment to existing productivity suite investments. With real-time collaboration, access-from-anywhere and zero-footprint, there is no surprise as to why consumers and SMBs have been adopting Google Apps at a high rate in the last couple of years.

But what about the enterprise level organization? Is it realistic to expect a large company to take Google’s advice and adopt Google Apps as a SaaS solution alongside an existing Office investment? Given its endearing benefits and strengths in mobility and sharing, it is certainly worth any given organizations time to see if it is possible to leverage Google Apps as a compliment to Microsoft Office.

Google Apps has become a very strong solution with respect to its collaborative abilities and overall “internet services” strength. Beyond its “out of the box” functionality, Google has also enabled Apps to acts as a platform that can be used by ISVs to extend their existing offerings and extend their capabilities with advanced collaboration, internet services as well as productivity-suite functionality.

This additional functionality has created a great opportunity the world of business intelligence to create a bridge between the on-premise and SaaS solutions for productivity suites. Through ISV extensions, Google Apps can become more than just a standalone suite. It can become a platform that does more than simple productivity suite tasks and therefore can be used to complement an organization’s existing Office suite.

One great example of a solution built on the power of Google Apps is Panorama’s Business intelligence suite. The world of BI is crying for advanced collaboration, access from anywhere, mobility and internet services integration and thus it makes total sense to use the power of Google Apps for such a solution.

Panorama Software, a longtime player in the world of business intelligence, has taken its BI solution and extended it with Google Apps. This provides two types of solutions, one for individuals and one for enterprise. Individuals that want to analyze spreadsheet data can take advantage of the new pivot table functionality in Google Apps. For enterprise companies, Panorama gives users the ability to analyze data from their legacy systems such as ERP and CRM in a highly collaborative way with people inside and outside the firewall.

A great example could be a sales manager within an organization who generates some interesting insights from reports that he/she creates within Panorama’s BI solution. For example, he/she may find a trend that sales in a certain region have always lagged during a certain time of the year under specific conditions. Normally, he/she would be limited to publishing a static report and sharing that with suppliers and/or partners. Utitlizing the highly collaborative SaaS solutions, via Google Apps, the same Sales Manager could collaborate with his/her suppliers and partners by working with the data on the cloud and allowing them to “play” with the data, too. This puts the ability to generate sound business insights into the hands of more people and allows organizations to get more out of their BI investments.

In this way, the world of business intelligence can become a proverbial playground for both Microsoft and Google to work together. From Google’s perspective, the scenario will never be about “replacing Office” as some of the raucous fans in the stands may be yelling and salivating for. Rather, it will be about having two productivity suites, sitting side-by-side, working in harmony, for a better BI world that will have newfound collaborative abilities!

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