Google: First we take Washington

Leonard Cohen sang "First we take Manhattan". And technology companies sang along: using New York based financial services companies as early adopters of their products and then building out from these beachhead customers. Sun was the prime example. But also think of Check Point firewalls, and of course RIM with the Blackberry. Wall Street customers were a key part of their early revenue, awareness, and indeed contributed to key features in many cases.

But now look at Google with Google Apps. As eWeek reports, Google is building out a Government Cloud service with Google Apps. It is a parallel system to the commercially-available Google Apps. That itself is interesting because Google Apps features multi-tenancy which in theory should have kept government users separate from other others. But clearly nobody wanted to take that chance.

The big story is that Google is using government, not Wall Street, as its beachhead. Where previously a technology company would have used a New York based financial services company as its prime reference, Google is targeting the US Federal Government. It's "First we take Washington", not "First we take Manhattan". And now that Google has a government offering, we see the ripples - like this ZDNet story: "Do you really need Office? Really? If the Feds don't, do we?"

This is part of a larger trend which we have seen first-hand in Vordel. Many branches of the US Government have chosen Vordel for their SOA deployments (e.g. the Federal Aviation Administration: FAA chooses Vordel for SOA work - Government Computing News). Our government customers are a prime reason why our US headquarters is in Herndon, close to Washington. On top of the Vordel deployments for government SOA, we are now seeing a lot of excitement for Cloud services using the Vordel Gateway Cloud Edition. As the VC blogger Jeff Bussgang from Flybridge Capital Partners has put it, "Washington is the New New York". It's where many innovative projects are, and it's where so much potential for Cloud Computing is.