Of the dozens of meeting requests I received in conjunction with this year’s Interop conference, the one I least expected came from Google. Interop is all about enterprise IT — networks, security, servers, stuff with gravitas — and Google is, well, Google.  Whatever it is, it’s not enterprise IT. Or is it?

It’s not IBM or Cisco, but in its own way, Google is becoming a serious IT company. According to Jonathan Rochelle, group product manager for collaboration apps (with whom I spoke on Tuesday), you can see the evidence of Google’s maturity in recent product launches such as Google Drive and BigQuery. They’re not half-baked computer science projects in the guise of applications, but fully baked products that have undergone lots of internal scrutiny.

Where does it live and what should it cost?

Today, Google isn’t just thinking about the technology when it releases products, but also about things such as pricing and ensuring applications stick around. It’s also naturally limiting the products it rolls out, Rochelle said, always asking, even of cool technology, “Where does it live?” Someone has to sponsor it, and it has to have a purpose.

That’s probably a good starting point considering the heat Google has taken over the past year for some significant product changes. CEO Larry Page’s “more wood behind fewer arrows” strategy, for example, might help boost the company’s bottom line, but users of some experimental services that got the axe weren’t too happy. And then there was Google Wave.

Users of App Engine, Google’s cloud computing application platform, were downright furious when the service lost its “alpha” label last September after about three years. Along with the status came new pricing model that threatened to raise the monthly bills for their apps — many of which weren’t generating much money in the first place — through the roof. For developers, it was re-architect your application for efficiency, pay a much larger bill or rebuild your application — built especially to run on App Engine — and take it elsewhere.

Rochelle acknowledged that some of Google’s past actions have resulted in “a valid concern when things are first introduced” that they won’t stick around.

“Do no evil” … and be prudent

However, with Drive, Rochelle said, the seven or so years it was in development actually resulted in a product that users can rest assured isn’t going anywhere and isn’t going to suddenly double in price. The technology is right and the team didn’t take lightly the task of developing a sustainable pricing model. Google is getting better at this kind of stuff, he said. “It matters to people.”

It didn’t hurt, either, that a market built up around Drive while it stayed tucked away inside the Googleplex instead of being rushed out the door. Box.net and Dropbox, “gave credibility to every layer of the concept,” Rochelle said.

Much of what makes Drive such a robust product off the bat also applies to BigQuery, Google’s recently released big data tool querying huge data sets via a spreadsheet interface. Although many users might never need to move beyond the free 100GB the service allows them to store and analyze, users paying for BigQuery can analyze up to 70TB of data.

BigQuery is targeting “big, hairy, audacious problems that you otherwise couldn’t solve,” said Rochelle, who spent years on Wall Street and knows the types of demands serious users can put on spreadsheets. And because it’s targeting users like those on Wall Street, or in pharmaceutical firms or genomics labs, BigQuery came with a service level agreement from day one.

You gotta break a few eggs to make an omelette

Google’s minimalist booth at Interop.

Actually, it’s Google’s quest to move beyond consumers and attract enterprise users that might be most responsible for its newfound maturity. Although Apps and everything else non-advertising is just a sliver of Google’s overall business, Rochelle said it’s a “significantly big business compared to its peers [in the collaboration and productivity software space].” In some ways, he said, “It’s shocking that we’re at that point.”

But competing against the likes of Microsoft and other large vendors comes at a cost. For one thing, there’s the constant litigation, customer poaching and public potshots all in an attempt to gain every possible edge over competitors. On the product side, although large customers will actually pay for products that work, they’re dead serious about those products working as advertised. For Google, that means no more (or at least a lot less) messing around.

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user Michael Drager.

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Every year at our Structure conference, we host a Launchpad for startups. It’s fun for the startups, it’s good for the investors who want to see what’s new, and it’s also a chance for the audience to see what’s coming on the horizon. But this year, we decided to give the final 10 startups that are chosen to present a bit more: We teamed up with venture firm Sequoia to give them a pre-launch hands-on training session at Sequoia HQ.

During that time, the participating finalists will learn how to pitch properly and learn the basics of good interpersonal skills at Sequoia’s Sand Hill Road headquarters. Once that’s all done, they’ll hop up onstage on June 20 to present their ideas to our audience of about 900 investors, executives, media and fellow entrepreneurs and more than 20,000 online video viewers. Check out last year’s finalists here, and read about DotCloud, the eventual winner.

If you are a startup in stealth mode, with a product, or just think you are all that and bag of chips, and you want in on the stage time and Sequoia session, then get busy and apply today! The deadline to apply for the Launchpad is May 16, although we’d love to see your application sooner. We’ll disclose the finalists on May 29 and you will present on June 20 at the Mission Bay Conference center in San Francisco.

At the show you’ll have the chance to meet some of our awesome speakers such as Werner Vogels of Amazon, Steve Herrod of VMware, and executives from Microsoft, Rackspace, and more. Plus, we’ll have cookies. And who doesn’t like cookies? Entrepreneurs, you still have a week, so check out the application and get busy.

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The Manager Tools rule on lateness is you can start work whatever time you like, but you better not be late for meetings. So being late for work here isn’t an issue. When I worked in a more conventional office though, punctuality was required. I was surprised therefore by some statistics in May’s Inc magazine: 27% of workers surveyed are late once a month, and 16% at least once a week. I want to know what kind of excuses you can make if you’re late once a week. It can’t always be traffic right?!

At conferences we often use lateness as an example for negative feedback. It’s a black and white issue (either you were late or you were not) and therefore easy to understand so it makes a good teaching tool. Sometimes we get asked though – isn’t it a bit trivial?

The thing about lateness is that it’s often a symbol of lack of attention in other areas. Work being done poorly, or lack of enthusiasm for building relationships. Lateness is the slippery slope – often an indication that you’ve already checked out. So if you or your directs are being late once a week, start looking for other indications.

Forwards and CCs are the mechanisms that make email suitable for many-party conversations. They are also very inefficient, which is why services such as Yammer do so well, but email’s extreme standardization makes it ubiquitous, so those are the tools we use.

Enter Squadmail, which has one of those ideas that seems quite obvious in retrospect: shared, cross-client email folders for collaboration. Or, as the company is fond of putting it, Dropbox for email.

The Berlin startup is bringing the service into public beta on Tuesday, following a successful private testing period. This is a service that can prove useful in both personal and business contexts, and the company says it’s been surprised at the level of early corporate takeup.

Just two months after sending out the first invite to a corporate user and with $0 marketing spending, we recently acquired the 500th company (with many more on the beta wait list right now),” Squadmail co-founder Philipp Mayer told me.

The idea is simple: Squadmail creates and syncs folders that are shared between IMAP mail servers, making the choice of client irrelevant. Each folder gets its own email address, and users can also drag emails from their personal folders into the shared folder, removing the need for CCs and forwards.

And the uses are also easily apparent. Businesses with heterogeneously-equipped staff? Friends trying to organise a shared flat rental? People who want easily-dumpable pseudo-accounts for newsletter signups? Check, check and check.

Readily international

According to Mayer, the private testing period has already drawn in active users in more than 70 countries. Squadmail is obviously a readily international service, but the bulk of the takeup has come from the U.S., and that’s already the core market for the small German firm.

“Right now, Germans make up less than 10 percent of our user base with a steadily declining share and U.S. users are rapidly approaching 50 percent,” he said. “When we first launched an early alpha in January we focused almost all our marketing efforts on Germans, thinking our chances were better with local users. But it turned out to be incredibly hard to gain momentum in Germany with beta conversion rates 50 percent below average and low activity rates for German users.”

As you can tell, Mayer is unusually confident about sharing stats on his product’s usage. Fair enough: there’s a lot to chew on there, particularly when it comes to that keen corporate takeup (half of which comprises small IT companies, with the remainder a mix of Fortune 500s, universities and NGOs).

Corporate users, who are not charged yet but will soon be targeted with additional paid-for features, are around 50 percent more active than users with private accounts, he says. It also seems that two-thirds of business users’ folders are shared with email contacts, with on average three people sharing each folder.

And the remaining third? Just one user — there, it appears the customers are using the folders for ‘Bacn’ mail.

There are a couple of downsides, such as the fact that the folder’s email address must currently end in ‘@box.squadmail.com’ (although the team says it will allow customers to use their own domains soon). The biggest limitation that immediately strikes me is that you can’t send emails from that shared folder/email address to someone outside the sharing group, but that will only be a barrier for some.

For the rest of us, Squadmail may be pushing it with its “Enjoy email again” tagline, but it’s certainly a tool that makes email that bit more relevant in this collaborative age.

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With the collaboration market already crowded with everything from task-focused tools like Asana to social products such as Yammer, plus offerings pitched to specific groups (Atlassian for software teams, Wiggio for college students), it’s hard to imagine an unoccupied niche for yet another tool, but Santa Monica, CA based startup Sparqlight thinks they’ve found one — scaling down business process management to provide a flexible, cloud-based option for the average knowledge worker.

“There’s people at the bottom of the market that have products like Do.com, online to-do lists, and they’re useful but they don’t have automation. They don’t have analytics. At the other end of the spectrum, you have huge BPM tools that can do workflow with automations, but it’s like trying to use a sledge hammer to drive in a tack,” explains Michael Weir, Sparqlight’s CMO. “Those [tools] are for companies with rigid industrial processes and everything that could possibly happen is built into the system. Our product is for what I call the big fat middle — people who need workflow, transparency, templates but who also live in the modern world where they collaborate with anyone, anytime, anywhere. They need it to be improvisational.”

Sparqlight was founded in 2010 to address this market segment and has thus far been entirely bootstrapped. It launched its public beta at SXSW this year, attracting more than 1,000 companies so far, from HR departments to engineering firms. Now they’re announcing the public launch of their enterprise solution. Like many of its competitors, Sparqlight has opted for a freemium model, offering a free, stripped-down version for individuals and small teams and from today a beefed up product for paying enterprise customers priced at $20 per user per month.

So what sets this product apart from other collaboration tools and allows it to target the “big fat middle”? In short, easy automation through templates. The base of the product is a to-do list and task tracking system that lets you assign work to yourself or others — either internal Sparqlight users or external non-users via email — setting due dates and reminders, commenting on tasks, and allowing you to track what’s outstanding and which steps have been completed. The result is an activity stream that can be filtered by project, importance, person or due date. So far, pretty similar to, say, Asana in its focus on following tasks rather than people and building a product that’s more about getting stuff done that breaking down barriers to information sharing.

The difference is a slightly more complicated set of enterprise-friendly additions like templates and analytics. Say you’re an HR person who routinely has to go through a checklist of activities for each new hire, from contacting IT to set up a new workstation, to putting together a benefits package. Sparqlight allows you to set up a template for that routine which, each time you use it, automatically inserts the relevant to-do items in your stream as well as the streams of collaborators—so in our hypothetical HR case, IT (either the group or a specific individual) would automatically receive a to-do item telling them to sort out the new hire’s tech tools. It’s also possible to automate workflow steps with Sparqlight. So after IT marks their task as completed, you can specify that a request be sent automatically to facilities to wheel over a comfy new chair, for example. Sparqlight also offers simple analytics that track how well users are doing at getting their tasks done in the free version and a heftier set of analytics tools, including key performance indicators for management, in the enterprise version.

Though Weir says individuals “see a lot of value just in creating to-dos and goals with associated to-dos and using templated workflow,” he concedes that the product “does start to add a lot of exponential value if you have other people on the system.” The product, in other words, is very much an enterprise tool that seems most useful when broadly deployed within a company. Sparqlight is planning on reaching out in the future to actively sell it to businesses rather than just rely on viral growth and small team adoption, Weir says.

The central premise behind Sparqlight — that routine work is boring and time consuming and automating these tasks frees up time for actual constructive and creative work  — will be immediately compelling to most knowledge workers. Who likes repetitive donkey work after all? To accomplish this goal, though, Sparqlight needs to be adopted, and whether the product is both powerful enough for enterprise and pleasant enough for individual workers to actually use remains to be seen.

Has anyone out there given Sparqlight a try, or if not, does this sort of automated workflow sound appealing?

Image courtesy of Sparqlight.

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Study after study shows that flexible work arrangements increase productivity and make for happier employees. But at the same time study after study reveals middle managers resist the idea as undermining their control and burdening them with additional responsibilities. While your initial impulse to this reality may be to throw up your hands in frustration and declare them dinosaurs, a recent forum on paid family leave at the Ford Foundation took a more constructive approach.

Cali Williams Yost, CEO of the Flex+Strategy Group / Work+Life Fit, attended the event and wrote up an incredibly useful post on the conclusions reached for Fast Company. In her experience, she writes, simple top-down strong arming of middle managers doesn’t get results. Instead, she suggests simple but effective techniques to help them work through their objections to flexible work and win their wholehearted buy-in:

Ask middle managers to help articulate the “why” or business case for work flexibility in your organization, and then let them participate in determining what that flexibility will look like. Interview middle managers–the supporters of flexibility as well as the naysayers. Ask them why they think it is or is not important to be more flexible in the way work is done. Encourage them to tell you how it will solve their business challenges. Gather groups of managers and employees together to expand this shared vision they’ve created. At the end of the process, people feel invested in this approach to flexible work that they developed themselves.

Allow middle managers to freely express the “prices” they fear they will pay, while also helping them to focus on the payoffs of work flexibility. I love naysayers. When I am consulting to a group of managers about work flexibility and one of them has the courage to say, “Yeah, but I’m going to be left doing more work,” I want to hug them. They are articulating one of the very real fears many of the middle managers have about changing the way work is done. When you give middle managers a chance to share those concerns freely, they are able to move beyond them. They start to see the long list of benefits from having a more flexible approach to work. But if they can’t, they get stuck behind the fears.

Establish the expectation, at the beginning, that any issues related to work flexibility that cause the group not to meet its goals will be resolved by everyone, not just the manager. For example, a manager finds that having two people in the group teleworking from home on the same day causes difficulty with customer coverage. That manager would call the group together and ask them to help her come up with a way to solve the problem. She wouldn’t be expected to take it upon herself to make it work.

Rather than suggest that middle managers need “bootcamp” and to be browbeaten into accepting that the future of work at their firms is more flexible, Williams Yost takes a more respectful route that treats managers like concerned and frightened humans not thick-headed impediments. And who isn’t more persuaded by respectful dialogue than insulting hectoring? William Yost’s approach seems not only more humane but also more likely to be effective. Want more details? Her post is interesting throughout and well worth a read in full.

What’s your approach to winning over remote work skeptics?  

Image courtesy Flickr user familymwr

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In an article in Businessweek, Michael Chertoff, former Secretary of Homeland Security gives an explanation of how to quickly get through the security checkpoints in an airport. His secrets include having your liquids and electronics accesible for easy removal and replacement. He also recommends having your change etc in your jacket pockets rather than your pants. That way you can lay the jacket, still loaded, in the tray, rather than rifling through your pants pockets.

I’m pretty good with security, but this article made me think, yet again, about optimisation. Smart people think about ways to improve every time single time they do something. Whether it’s a conversation or a physical skill or a process that has to be gone through, there’s a way to improve it.

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-04-12/how-to-speed-through-air…

Software, Marc Andreessen declared last summer, is eating the world. In the pages of the WSJ, the Netscape co-founder reeled off a list of industries that were once about something else and are now are dominated by software, from Amazon in the bookselling space to Skype in telecoms and Netflix in video. That’s good news for the American economy, he argued, but it also seems to be really good news for Atlassian.

The Australian software company offers tools to help teams build software and it’s had a phenomenal run of 40 straight quarters of profitability, pulling in more than $100 million in revenue last year (with exactly zero salespeople). Entirely bootstrapped for the first six years of its existence, the company is now rumored to be pondering an IPO. And president Jay Simons feels they’re just getting started. Why? Well, because software is eating the world.

“We chose early on to really focus on what we think is a strategic problem for all companies, which is how do you build software better?” Simons explained to GigaOM in an interview, “and one of the reasons that we’ve exploded is that we’re at the beginning of this digital revolution. Entire industries are being upended by software companies.”

Like Andreessen, Simons cites the usual suspects of Netflix, Amazon and Skype, but he feels that these well chronicled cases are only the tip of the iceberg, and that’s only good news for his company. “Brick and mortar companies in almost every industry are now having to differentiate their own products through software,” he says, offering the automobile industry as an example.

“If you watched the Super Bowl, it was oversubscribed with automotive commercials and each of those automotive commercials was actually advertising software. The car itself isn’t going to evolve much mechanically. What has totally changed is that software is now driving fuel-efficiency systems, safety systems, on-board entertainment and navigation systems. Google famously, and I’m sure the auto industry itself, is trying to figure out how the car is going to drive itself,” he says. “Your television set, your alarm clock, your garage door opener, your thermostat, you don’t think about those things as software products but they are or they soon will be,” Simons concludes.

This change, he argues, is literally and figuratively bringing software development out of the basement of companies and making it central to what they do, reconfiguring the workflow of everyone from customer service folks to marketing pros in the process, as they too find themselves involved in producing software. “Some of the creativity, business requirements and customer requirements are all going to come from non-engineers. They need to be communicated and shared and iterated with the engineers that are going to transform those into code. That’s a big difference today than it was five years ago,” Simons says.

Despite these promising trends, the growth of the company may not be without friction, as PandoDaily’s Sarah Lacy points out. “Right now there’s a feel-good API stew of these up-and-coming social enterprise players all wanting to support one another, ” she recently wrote. “That’s in keeping with the consumer Internet world, where people generally believe it’s not a zero-sum game and there is room for multiple players. But in the enterprise world, where people pay for software, a land-war might develop between who wants to be the knowledge worker portal and who wants to be a mere API partner integrating into it.”

These lurking potential problems aside, Atlassian’s ten-year-old bet on helping engineers and non-techies build software together seems to be paying off for the time being. “What developers and what people create with code is in some ways limitless,” Simons says before mentioning the speculation about an impending IPO. “I’m personally excited about it,” he says. No wonder lots of other people are chattering about this potential IPO in the usually less than sexy world of development tools too.

Image courtesy of Flickr user ianmyles.

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Traditional business culture, with its emphasis on networking, meetings and pitching, doesn’t generally favor introverts. And as Susan Cain argued fairly recently in The New York Times, the current management mania for collaboration, is making matters worse for the quiet ruminators among us. Is remote working the solution to the problem?

We tackled this question in relation to the coworking movement previously, soliciting opinions from space owners and users. Many of them argued that, though coworking spaces have a social element and stress togetherness and connection, the fact that the user sets their own level of contact, as opposed to having interactions dictated by a boss, means coworking provides a good balance of interaction and alone time for introverts.

But how about remote work itself, without considering coworking as a mediating factor – does work location independence further isolate the already socially distant or help them better modulate their level of connection? That’s the question an interesting post on Workshifting by Natalya Sabga tackled recently. In it Sagba focuses on her personal experience as an introverted “workshifter,” relating her ups and downs as she’s attempted to strike the right the balance between solitary work and social interaction:

I’ve been dipping my toes into the workshifting pool since 2009. It’s been an ideal set of circumstances for an introvert like me, as I work in a quiet space where I can control my daily dosage of interruption and interaction. Ideal, that is, until too much of a good thing becomes a bad thing.

Introverts need interaction, too. That is just human nature 101… Introverts who work in a standard office setting get their daily dosage of interaction by default. Introverts who workshift have it harder – it’s too easy to focus on a project or assignment and forget that there is an external world that we need to be part of, too!

So, after basking in every introvert’s dream for the past three years, I realized that I needed some balance. Sometimes, my workdays are intense, and I really can only focus on work. I don’t fight my introverted habits on those days as that would adversely affect my productivity. Other days, when my schedule is lighter, I remind myself to explore new spaces to workshift from, make time to see friends or volunteer.

A couple of points are worth noting here. One is the danger that the ability to work from anywhere might enable more withdrawal than is healthy among introverts. While loneliness is an often-cited drawback of working from home, the idea that someone could like the alone time but suffer for it professionally and psychically in the longer-term is a subtly different point that’s worth bearing in mind.

The second aspect of Sabga’s post worth pondering is the fact that she has both the awareness to notice her own excess of solitude and the freedom, due to technological empowerment, to correct it. Too often, many have argued, we choose our work environment on autopilot and fail to both recognize the degree to which the location of our work affects us and manipulate how we work by manipulating where we work.

Do you think remote work presents special challenges for introverts?

Image courtesy of Flickr user Pascal Maramis.

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Today’s businesses require highly virtualized and services-on-demand environments. And that’s causing the network as we have known it to undergo a dramatic change. Brocade is leading this transformation with cloud-optimized networks that simplify infrastructure, increase efficiency and provide scalability so you can deliver applications, services and virtualized desktops anywhere on the network, securely and without interruption. Soon we’ll even be able to do the same with your entire data center. The future is built in. Brocade has over 25 combined years in building data center networking and Ethernet fabric technology. Learn why 90 percent of the Global 1000 and two-thirds of the world’s Internet exchanges rely on Brocade at brocade.com/everywhere