Could Google Wave Tip Microsoft's SharePoint Cash Cow?

Microsoft solution providers that have built thriving businesses on Office SharePoint Server would be unlikely candidates to admire anything coming from Google. Still, some VARs say an impressive new Google service portends a coming "arms race" of innovation in the enterprise collaboration space.

Last week, Google unveiled a developer preview of Google Wave, a service and platform that weaves together e-mail, instant messaging, document sharing, blogging and wikis in a single application. Google Wave won't be publicly available until later this year, but already some Microsoft partners are calling it an undeniably interesting concept that could force Microsoft to step up its game.

By blurring lines between e-mail and instant messaging, as well as between the diametrically opposed worlds of realtime conversation and documents, Google Wave represents a looming challenge, if not a threat, to the Microsoft SharePoint cash cow, according to solution providers.

"I don't think Google Wave is an immediate threat to SharePoint, but the race is on, and both Google and Microsoft are going to be pushing each other to create innovative products," said Neil Pearlstein, president of PC Professional, an Oakland, Calif.-based Microsoft Gold Partner.

Daniel Milian, vice president of business strategy at CoolTronics, a Tampa, Fla.-based solution provider, says one of Google Wave's strengths is that it lets users manage multiple different methods of online interaction. "It's going to fix a lot of problems we have with the proliferation of multiple popular collaboration tools -- not just e-mail and IM, but also services like Twitter and Facebook," he said.

Google Wave consists of a Web application based on HTML 5 and built using the Google Web Toolkit, and a platform with open APIs that developers can use to embed Wave in other Web services and create extensions that work inside of Waves. Underlying these two elements is the Google Wave protocol, which Google plans to make available to the open-source community to drive more usage.

SharePoint has been a formidable revenue engine for Microsoft, and a big reason for this success is that it's also a development platform around which Microsoft ISVs can develop their own vertically-oriented SharePoint add-ons. So it's possible Google simply wants to create an open-source collaboration platform alternative to SharePoint.

But for now, Google Wave merely represents a new level of innovation for collaboration, and something that works differently than existing offerings. As such, Google Wave is more likely to motivate Microsoft to add more innovation to SharePoint than it is to grab market share from Microsoft, solution providers said.

At this point, it's not clear how Google Wave development will take into account things such as security, user directory and business policy regulation, all of which pose massive challenges to anyone looking to present a real threat to SharePoint, said Ric Opal, vice president of Peters & Associates, an Oakbrook Terrace, Ill.-based solution provider. "Until I see that stuff coming from the open-source community and interfacing back to enterprise applications, I don't see this as a threat," Opal said.

But Ken Winell, CEO of ExpertCollab, a SharePoint-focused solution provider in Florham Park, N.J., doesn't see Google Wave as a business play at all. He believes Google's real target isn't to challenge Microsoft SharePoint, but rather to push the envelope in the social networking space.

"I think Facebook is the more likely target," Winell said. "It certainly is something to keep an eye on, but I don't think Microsoft has to worry about it for now."

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