Google Wave: is it a tsunami for Enterprise software?

On 30 of September the destructive tsunami wave hit the islands in Pacific Ocean. We don't know if this was a part of Google Wave promotion, but the effect from both is quiet comparable. Yesterday Google started sending 100000 invitations to Google Wave and the craze around this event has nothing similar in the Internet history. The number of news and comments about it is amazing and people already selling  the invites on eBay for couple hundreds of bucks. Of course, it's a new cool and game-changing products, but lets calm down and think about its enterprise-perspectives.

As usual it happens with Google, the developers don't know exactly what is the target market for Google Wave. Is it for community of Sudoku players or for effective business communications. During the Q&A session in May, when asked about positioning, promotion and monetization of Google Wave,  Google reps said “We really haven’t thought about that too much”. So, probably, Google Wave is going to have the same problems on the enterprise market, that GMail is facing today. Moreover, it seams that Google won't earn money on this service.

The industry gurus first of all expect that Google Wave will become an umbrella for all Google business apps, integrating them in a single platform, that will rival Microsoft Sharepoint. Recently we were talking about Google Sites as of possible Sharepoint rival. But this only applies to the small collaboration niche. Because Sharepoint is not only the collaboration tool, but it's a platform for building and integrating the whole IT infrastructure. The same is with Google Wave - it provides a platform for developers, and unlike Sharepoint, this platform is open-source. That means that it's more suitable for integration and building plugins.

As regards the collaboration tools of Google Wave, the experts say that this service will be able to replace Email only if it integrates with Email. And first of all with Outlook (that is used in 60% of organizations). Because Email is an universal standard for communication between companies. And what if your partner doesn't have a Google Wave account? Email is the only way to reach him.

Besides, the new Google product, if it wants to be adopted by enterprises, should work hard to enhance the user interface (as it's too complicated), security tools (in particular spam protection), access rights management in the wave and information tagging (to make it more structured and searchable).

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