Desktop applications hosted from outside the enterprise - or Google apps for short - are now being seriously considered by many large companies and are being discussed for the first time at a tif. workshop being held in May.IT chiefs now recognise the potential of Google applications to save hard cash. They also recognise that as a model of working, the one fee annual subscription model can offer organisations more flexibility and more agility. Companies can use applications immediately, or use them for a while and then stop. They don’t have to go through the infrastructure upgrades, applications deployment and integration processes that slow things down and they don’t need to worry as much about the complex compliance, governance and auditing issues that come with more traditional, licence-based software models.

In practice of course, there are several large challenges to face first and chief among these is a cultural. Hosting company applications externally, and especially through a consumer brand such as Google, just isn’t how things are traditionally done. There are image, risk and security concerns to consider plus Google takes a highly ‘consumerised’, entrepreneurial approach to software development which means that it is constantly changing, upgrading and tagging on new bells and whistles to its products. A ‘light touch’ approach that may need to be tempered for the weighty corporate customer with long-term, highly risk-assessed software life cycles and managed IT estates. A meeting of minds is clearly needed and will happen if CIOs can see potential business benefits - and they do.

Perhaps the bigger question is what impact this new approach will have on the market and how will traditional software models be influenced as a result?