Today we're announcing the launch of the latest version of the Google Search Appliance, GSA 6.0. We've packed it full of so many new features that it's difficult to even count them. Check out the videos linked below to see some highlights, and I'll tell you how we got to this point -- the origins of (GSA)n.


As you might know, last August, we launched "10 million docs in a box ". Building on the premise of scale with simplicity, we (the engineering team) challenged ourselves to see how much further we could go, while still keeping the architecture extremely simple. After many late-night sessions spent diagramming on the whiteboards and chugging cappuccinos, we had a breakthrough.

The end result was a new architecture: (GSA)ⁿ. When we tested it out, the product manager was pretty excited about all the new features and search power. He was used to hearing about the millions of docs we could handle – but this time we were going to push it to a new realm: billions.

The idea was simple; build technology to connect as many appliances as you'd like, whether in one location or separated across departments or even across continents - and still provide a unified set of results to the end-user – the employee searching for an elusive document or piece of information. This would not only give our customers unparalleled ability to scale, but enable them to integrate all the data in their organizations. Information doesn’t do you much good if you can’t find it! That was our guiding principle.

One of our beta customers, MTCSC Inc., really needs the geographic integration. When we caught up with them, MTCSC was in the midst of deploying over 50 GSAs all over the world for a federal customer, connecting to over 2,500 data sources and consisting of data on websites, file shares, databases, and SharePoint servers. The new GSA 6.0 architecture is now helping them integrate information from the varied data centers to provide users with a single, unified set of results.

So imagine there is a database that might “live” in Egypt, some documents in a data center in Sydney, and a fileshare whose homebase is Los Angeles. The new GSA 6.0 integration can handle searching through all those data stores and give the employee who is looking a simple page of search results – one that looks as easy to use as Google.com – even though the backend search is really complicated.

And, since we were feeling ambitious, we added a Ranking Framework (where administrators can easily feed in server logs and other enterprise-specific information to improve relevance of search results), multiple new biasing options, and an administrative API to provide more control for automation of common tasks. We also added support for both early binding and late binding, providing organizations with flexible security policies to meet their needs.

The bottom line: safer, higher-quality, more customizable enterprise search with (GSA)ⁿ.

This morning, both Google and our customers, including MTCSC, spoke at an event on all the new developments leading to (GSA)ⁿ and the 6.0 version. We talked so much about searching a billion documents, we decided to try something we’ve never seen done before: set up and showcase the actual infrastructure required to search a billion docs, and you can see it here. It is surprisingly small and simple, and pretty cool to know that we can now take the amount of content in the entire Google.com index in the year 2000 (when Google.com was searching though just a billion docs), and pack it into a server rack built that could fit in the corner of my living room. And I have a normal-sized living room.

Posted by Shamim Alpha, Enterprise Search Engineer

Learn more about the Google Search Appliance 6.0 at google.com/gsa

Yesterday we released a complete data source implementation for the Google Visualization API open wire protocol in an open source Java library. This enables users of the Visualization API, including enterprises, SMBs and other web application providers, to easily customize their data sources and make them compatible with the Visualization API Open Wire protocol. For some data sources, integrating this library could be an order of magnitude faster and require less resources than having to do a full implementation out of the protocol specification.

As business data continues to grow, so, it seems, does the challenge of understanding it. Visualization, or the presentation of data in charts, graphs, tables, and other visual representations, is often the missing piece that people need to make sense of this information.

To address these growing needs, last year we introduced the Google Visualization API, a powerful API that enables anyone to build apps and display data from Google spreadsheets, as well as enabling visualization in the cloud from any data source connected to the web.

Companies can create and use reporting applications from the Google Visualization Gallery that can be integrated anywhere on the web. The gallery offers dozens of visualizations, from pivot tables and heat graphs to the celebrated motion charts and timelines.

We have also opened up the gallery so that any developer can include their new innovative visualizations and make them available to others. To facilitate multiple data sources, we have published an Open Wire protocol that specifies how to make any data source ready for use by the Visualization API. And we recently announced the Google Secure Data Connector (SDC), which enables to keep the data sources behind a company firewall, while serving visualizations and other apps in the cloud.

All of these abilities bring us closer towards Open Visualization in the cloud, and today we take one more big step in this direction. We believe that these enhancements will facilitate innovative and more accessible visualizations of business information, helping enterprises communicate with information in ever-better ways.

Posted by Nir Bar-Lev, Head of Analytics, EMEA, and Yossi Matias, Head of Israel Engineering Center

Editor's Note: We're pleased to welcome guest blogger Louis Gary, Manager of Client Services, Information Services Department, Hamilton Beach Brands, Inc. Louis recently completed a global migration to Google Apps from Lotus Notes/Domino. Louis has been a technology manager at Hamilton Beach for 14 years. During this time, he introduced PC networks and WAN connections to the various operating locations worldwide, was an early adopter to VPN technologies, migrated the company from cc:Mail to Lotus Notes, and expanded VoIP into their customer service center.

He currently manages the desktop support team which provides employee support for PC, phone, multi-function (print, scan, fax) devices, e-mail, and application training.

I've done many migrations in my years in IT and, although they can be fun as a technologist, they're never easy. But I'm getting out of the upgrade business altogether now that my company, Hamilton Beach, recently switched to Google Apps. Many of you may know Hamilton Beach for the coffee makers, blenders, toasters or the panini grills that sit on your kitchen countertop. As a global brand with design, engineering and manufacturing operations located around the world, our IT department supports diverse functions. We recently had to deal with an upgrade to our Lotus Notes/Domino messaging system to keep up with growing business needs.

Because of the complexity, we upgrade our Lotus Notes/Domino environment about every five years. Our current version was coming to an end of life. Since the software would be free, under maintenance, we certainly looked at upgrading to a newer version of Lotus Notes/Domino. We were looking at old servers that would need to be replaced, all of the desktop client software requiring an upgrade, as well as training for employees on the new look and feel. We had so much e-mail, we estimated the upgrade might take more time than a three-day weekend to complete, with the email system shut down. So we took a look at Google Apps and found that it had all the enterprise features we needed.

Key features include the instant global access, support for different languages across our world-wide operations, virtually limitless storage, and speed. We really did not anticipate how much faster the e-mail system would be. Additionally, we will put be adding the Postini archiving solution and will look at how we can leverage Google Docs and Sites to improve our global collaboration.

And we never shut down the e-mail system!

Moving to Google Apps has reduced our total cost of ownership by 60% over a 5 year-period. But it also gives me the great pleasure of turning off all of our Lotus Domino servers that were dedicated to email! And since Google Apps is delivered as a cloud-based solution, I don't have to worry about the next upgrade.

We learned a lot from this experience and I'm happy to share with you some insights I've learned about making a successful migration. Please join me for a webinar covering our migration. Details follow:

Wednesday, May 20, 009
10:00 a.m. PDT / 1:00 p.m. EDT

I'll be on hand to answer your questions about how we deployed Google Apps to our global employee base.

Posted by Serena Satyasai, Google Apps Marketing Team

Get timely updates on new features in Google Apps by subscribing to our RSS feed or email alerts.

Today, we announced Rich Snippets for Google web search, a new presentation of snippets that highlight structured data embedded in web pages. Rich Snippets provide summary information, including important page-specific attributes, to help users quickly identify result relevance. Experiments on Google have shown that users find the additional data valuable – if they see useful and relevant information from a web page, they are more likely to click through to it. Our web search team is currently experimenting with a limited set of attributes for reviews and user profiles that webmasters can provide through in-line markup in their web pages by using open standards such as microformats or RDFa.

Since Google Site Search leverages our web search platform, Google Site Search customers can benefit from this new functionality as well. In fact, Google Site Search customers can define their own custom attributes that we'll index and return with your site search results. In addition to microformats and RDFa, you can also provide custom metadata within your webpages via special markup called page maps. A page map identifies specific attributes that are recognized and preserved by Google at index time, and returned along with search results for presentation to the user.

So if you're using Google Site Search on your website, you can now control further how your content appears in search results. You can showcase key information, such as image thumbnails, summaries, ratings in your result snippets if you provide the appropriate markup on your pages.

Rich Snippets attribute information for Google Site Search is only returned in XML (via <PageMap> tags), so you can use your own customized presentation controls. Indexing of the rich snippets information can have unspecified latency, as some pages are indexed and refreshed more frequently than others, and page map attributes may not be indexed from all web pages.

As an illustration of Rich Snippets, the web page featured in the following example provides custom information about an image thumbnail that is displayed in the rich snippet of the result along with date, author and category information.

If you are getting results back via XML, then the custom attributes are returned in the results within the PageMap tag, as shown below. You can parse the DataObjects within the PageMap tag and provide customized presentation of the relevant attributes.

If you are new to Google Site Search and would like to provide Google quality search results on your website, visit www.google.com/sitesearch

Posted by Nitin Mangtani, Lead Product Manager, Google Enterprise Search

In early April we unveiled App Engine for Java as a preview release. With the goal of providing an end-to-end Java solution for web applications, this release includes an early look at our Java runtime, integration with Google Web Toolkit, and a Google Plugin for Eclipse.

We're excited about the potential to use these tools to build scalable applications that complement the Google Apps suite of messaging and communication services. We're eager to share what we've learned so far, and encourage you to try it out and give feedback.

To help with that, we hope you'll join us for two upcoming events focused on developers, where you'll hear about our experience and that of partners who've begun development with App Engine and Google Apps. Then, give App Engine a try and join the conversation in our developer and partner communities and let us know what you think.

Details:

• Partner Webinar, May 12: Building Enterprise Applications Using Google App Engine for Java. Google is pairing up with Appirio, a Google Enteprise Partner, to offer a webinar detailing these new developer capabilities. The event targets IT leads and app developers within enterprise companies and takes place at 10:00 a.m. PDT / 1:00 p.m. EDT on Tuesday, May 12. Register or learn more here.
  

• Partner Event May 14: Partner with cloud leaders Google and Salesforce.com. Google and Salesforce.com are jointly hosting an ISV-focused event on Thursday afternoon, May 14 in Sunnyvale, California to discuss building a cloud computing strategy. If you're in the area, register here for this free event to test drive the latest cloud technologies, meet Salesforce.com and Google partner representatives, and network with cloud experts, fellow entrepreneurs, and developers.

Also: Google I/O May 27-28th: The Google I/O Developer Conference is May 27–28, 2009 in San Francisco, California. Learn more about the enterprise-focused sessions and sign up.

Posted by: Maureen Bradford, Enterprise Partner Marketing Manager

More than 3,000 businesses adopt Google Apps every day. They range from ten-person companies who switch in a few hours to large companies and universities that plan their move from on-premises servers over weeks and months. Ensuring a smooth change is a big priority for us, and we're making the transition a little easier for mobile users.

We're pleased to announce the upcoming release of the Google Apps Connector for BlackBerry® Enterprise Server. This new software component will make it even easier for mobile users to use Google Apps on BlackBerry® smartphones. It allows users to access Gmail, Google Calendar and Contacts using the built-in BlackBerry smartphone applications they already know and love.

For instance, users can instantly receive Gmail messages within the built-in email client on their Blackberry smartphones. And they can continue to use the same shortcuts to manage their BlackBerry messages.

New meeting invites and event changes in Google Calendar are immediately updated on the BlackBerry Calendar, keeping both calendars in sync. Users can also access the email addresses and phone numbers of their co-workers using a company wide Global Address List. Both personal and business contacts saved on Google Apps are automatically synchronized over the air to users' BlackBerry smartphones and integrated into the native Blackberry smartphone applications.

The transition for IT administrators is also seamless. Admins are given full control of the solution and can continue to manage BlackBerry smartphones using BlackBerry Enterprise Server. Google Apps Connector installs on BlackBerry Enterprise Server, connecting it to the Google Apps cloud and synchronizing email, calendar and contacts for all BlackBerry smartphone users.

Google Apps Connector for BlackBerry Enterprise Server is currently in beta testing with select companies and universities, and will be available free of charge to all Premier and Education Edition customers this July. Those of you who enjoy the Gmail experience with conversations, labels and full search capabilities can continue to use Gmail for mobile.

Learn more: The Google Apps Connector team is at the Wireless Enterprise Symposium (WES) in Orlando, Florida this week. If you're also attending this conference, come visit us at Booth #105. We'll also be giving a live demo at our breakout session on Tuesday, May 5, 2009 at 11am EST. Hope to see you there.

Posted by Raju Gulabani, Product Management Director

The Google I/O Developer Conference is coming up in just four weeks, on May 27 – 28, 2009 in San Francisco, California, so we thought now would be a good time to give you a sneak preview into some of the exciting Enterprise sessions we have planned.

Growing a SaaS-based services business reselling Google Apps
presented by Jeff Ragusa

Traditional value-added resellers are looking for ways to adapt their business for the world of cloud computing and the new Google Apps Authorized Reseller program provides the perfect framework for moving a services business in this direction. This session will focus on revenue opportunities for partners in this area ranging from assisting with SaaS product selection, to guidance on best practices, to custom application development, deployment & integration work, and managed services. Learn how Google's reseller program can enable service providers to take advantage of these opportunities through marketing, sales and technical tools and resources. See Jeff's video invitation to his session here.

Extending the Google Search Appliance to Crawl Valuable Data Behind the Firewell
presented by Nitin Mangtani

The Google Search Appliance is an on-premise hardware and software solution that brings Google search into the enterprise, so users can find content quickly and securely. In this session, learn how partners today are plugging enterprise data sources into the GSA through Connectors and displaying results using OneBox. See Nitin's video invitation to his session here.

OpenSocial in the Enterprise
presented by Chris Schalk, Mark Wentzel, Dave Carroll, Rich Manalang, and Tugdual Grall

With OpenSocial's proven global success in traditional social applications, the enterprise software community has begun to realize its potential and build innovative solutions that cater to the enterprise. Join us for a session centered on how the enterprise software development community is successfully bringing social concepts and technology into the enterprise. Key enterprise players will present and demonstrate how they've successfully used OpenSocial software to build new social solutions.

One last thing to remember: even though Google I/O will be primarily geared around breakout sessions, there will be a ton of other interesting stuff going on, including the Developer Sandbox, Fireside Chats, Tech Talks and After Hours Playground. Click here to register.

Posted by Chris Kelly, Google Apps Partners team

Recently, McKinsey & Company published a study on cloud computing as part of a symposium for The Uptime Institute, an organization dedicated to supporting the enterprise data center industry. We share McKinsey's interest in helping the IT industry better understand cloud computing, so we'd like to join the conversation Appirio and others have started about the role of cloud computing for large enterprises.

There's quite a bit of talk these days about corporations building a "private cloud" with concepts like virtualization, and there can be significant benefits to this approach. But those advantages are amplified greatly when customers use applications in the scalable datacenters provided by companies like Google, Amazon, Salesforce.com and soon, Microsoft. In this model, customers can leverage hardware infrastructure, distributed software infrastructure, and applications that are built for the cloud, and let us run it for them. This offers them much lower cost applications, and removes the IT maintenance burden that can cripple many organizations today. It also allows customers to deliver innovation to their end users much more rapidly.

We thought we'd provide some insight into what we mean when we say cloud computing, and how its advantages in cost and innovation continue to attract hundreds of thousands of companies of all sizes -- from 2nd Wind Exercise Equipment to Genentech. We created our cloud by building an optimized system from the ground up: starting with low-cost hardware, adding reliable software infrastructure that scales, offering innovative applications, and working every day to improve the whole system. While the McKinsey study only considered the hardware cost savings of the cloud, there is tremendous customer benefit in all of these areas.

Hardware infrastructure
It starts with components. We serve tens of millions of users, so we've had to build infrastructure that scales and can run extremely efficiently to support that load. Consider three areas of data center design: server design, energy efficiency, and scale of operations.

In the virtualization approach of private data centers, a company takes a server and subdivides it into many servers to increase efficiency. We do the opposite by taking a large set of low cost commodity systems and tying them together into one large supercomputer. We strip down our servers to the bare essentials, so that we're not paying for components that we don't need. For example, we produce servers without video graphics chips that aren't needed in this environment.

Additionally, enterprise hardware components are designed to be very reliable, but they can never be 100% reliable, so enterprises spend a lot of time and money on maintenance. In contrast, we expect the hardware to fail, and design for reliability in the software such that, when the hardware does fail, customers are just shifted to another server. This allows us to further lower the cost of our servers by using commodity parts and on-board storage. We also design the systems for easy repair such that, if a part fails, we can quickly bring the server back into service.

Traditionally, companies have focused on using large, highly reliable hardware to run databases and large backend systems, but there is a significant cost impact to that strategy. For example, a 4 CPU quad-core system with 600 GB of high end SCSI storage and 16GB of memory is 8 times more expensive than a system 1/4 its size with less expensive SATA storage. This is because the price of the components increase exponentially as the hardware gets larger and more reliable. By building the reliability into the software, we're able to use a much lower cost hardware platform but still maintain the same reliability to customers.

Beyond server design, we do everything possible to make our servers and data centers as efficient as possible from an energy and cooling perspective. Consider how we designed our data centers for energy efficiency. Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) is an industry-standard metric for measuring the efficiency of a data center. We recently shared that the average PUE for our data centers is now better than the state-of-the-art 2011 data center PUE prediction by the EPA. In other words, we beat the EPA's best case estimates three years early, and we achieved this result without the use of exotic infrastructure solutions thought necessary in the EPA report. And we're doing that at every level of the stack: from server utilization to networking.

Finally, we operate at scale, and that drives economies of scale. Just by managing thousands of servers together and making them homogeneous, we're able to cut down on our administrative costs dramatically and pool resources of many types. This benefits end users by enabling us to offer low prices.

But, most importantly for our customers, we manage this entire infrastructure such that they don't have to. According to Gartner, a typical IT department spends 80% of their budget keeping the lights on, and this hampers their ability to drive change and growth in their business. The reality is that most businesses don't gain a competitive advantage from maintaining their own data centers. We take on that burden and make it our core business so that our customers don't have to.

Software Infrastructure

While most discussions of cloud computing and data center design take place at the hardware level, we offer a set of scalable services that customers would otherwise have to maintain themselves in a virtualization model. For example, if a company wanted to implement a typical three tier system in the cloud using virtualization, they would have to build, install, and maintain software to run the database, app server, and web server. This would require them to spend time and money to acquire the licenses, maintain system uptime, and implement patches.

In contrast, with a service like Google App Engine, customers get access to the same scalable application server and database that Google uses for its own applications. This means customers don't have to worry about purchasing, installing, maintaining, and scaling their own databases and app servers. All a customer has to do is deploy code, and we take care of the rest. You only pay for what you need, and, with App Engine's free quota, you often don't pay anything at all.

A great example of software infrastructure that scales is the recent online town hall meeting held by President Obama. The White House was able to instantly scale its database to support more than 100,000 questions and in excess of 3.5 million votes, without worrying about usage spikes that typically would be tough to manage. Because of the cloud, there was no need to provision extra servers to handle the increased demand or forecast demand ahead of time.

Applications
Beyond the underlying hardware and software design, what attracts many customers to the cloud is application outsourcing.

There is limited value to running an Exchange Server in a virtual machine in the cloud. That server was never designed for the cloud, so you don't get additional scale. You'd also need to continue to maintain and monitor the mail server yourself, so the labor savings are marginal. But with cloud-based applications like Gmail, we take care of all of the hassle for you. We keep the application up and running, and have designed it to scale easily. All of this provides an application that is roughly less than 1/3 the cost of a privately hosted mail system, has 100x the typical storage, and innovates much faster.

Innovation
While the cost advantages of cloud computing can be great, there's another advantage that in many ways is more important: the rapid pace of innovation. IT systems are typically slow to evolve. In the virtualization model, businesses still need to run packaged software and endure the associated burden. They only receive major feature enhancements every 2-3 years, and in the meantime they have to endure the monthly patch cycle and painful system-wide upgrades. In our model, we can deliver innovation quickly without IT admins needing to manage upgrades themselves. For example, with Google Apps, we delivered more than 60 new features over the last year with only optional admin intervention.

The era of delayed gratification is over – the Internet allows innovations to be delivered as a constant flow that incorporates user needs, offers faster cycles for IT, and enables integration with systems that were not previously possible. This makes major upgrades a thing of the past, and gives the customer greater and greater value for their money.

As companies weigh private data centers vs. scalable clouds, they should ask a simple question: can I find the same economics, ease of maintenance, and pace of innovation that is inherent in the cloud?

Posted by Rajen Sheth, Senior Product Manager, Google Apps

In the year and a half since we acquired Postini, we've integrated a number of their message security features into Google Apps Premier Edition, including additional spam and virus filtering, content policy management tools, and archiving. Today we're pleased to announce the addition of another feature to Google Apps that many of you have been asking for: policy-enforced Transport Layer Security (TLS, RFC 2246) to help you secure the transport of messages between domains with a simple point-and-click interface.

With policy-enforced TLS, IT administrators can set up policies for securely sending and receiving mail between specific domains. For example, you could specify that all external mail sent by your accounting team members with your bank be secured with the TLS standard, and defer if TLS is not possible. Similarly, you could mandate a secure TLS connection between your domain and your outside legal counsel, auditors, and any other partners with whom your employees may trade sensitive communications. The new functionality makes it easy for an IT admin to use the TLS standard for reliable, secure email delivery – with no hardware or software to add or maintain.

We're also making a change to the message discovery and archiving feature in Google Apps for new customers. We've learned that most of our customers want at least one year of archiving, so the 90-day message archive is no longer being offered to customers who sign up after April 22. All customers can continue to buy one year of message archiving with unlimited storage for $13 per user per year, and up to 10 years of archiving with unlimited storage for $33 per user per year. Note that those of you already using Premier Edition will continue to be able to retain mail for 90 days.

Enforce an email footer to apply to outbound emails.

On the 'Outbound Servers' tab, set your TLS policies easily in the Google Postini Admin console. Settings can apply to inbound and outbound messages.

Let us know what you think about today's news. We're committed to providing the world class security and compliance technology you need in an easy and affordable way, and we welcome your comments and feedback.

Posted by Navneet Goel and Matt O'Connor, Product Managers, Google Postini services team

Recent commentary on channel growth around cloud computing and the emerging business scenarios for trusted IT advisors are good examples of the growing momentum around the ecosystem of channel partners like consultants, resellers and developers pursuing new models for doing business in the cloud. We're excited to share details of what we're seeing and are we're pleased to offer two ways to learn more about the benefits of cloud computing.

For solutions providers, developers, and resellers. Co-hosted by Google and salesforce.com, this live discussion is aimed at helping channel partners understand the business change that cloud computing drives, and how to build the services that help customers benefit from these changes. Participants can expect to gain a fuller understanding of what cloud computing is, how it transforms the way that organizations think about IT, and how to make the most of the opportunity "in the cloud" for business growth and development.

Partner with Google and Salesforce.com

Wednesday, April 29
10:00 a.m. PDT / 1:00 p.m. EDT

For organizations thinking of moving to a cloud platform for business productivity. We're participating with Daston Corporation, a Google Apps Authorized Reseller, to showcase Google Apps, Google's enterprise-ready communication and collaboration tools. This live webinar will feature an overview of Google Apps, and how the expertise of resellers like Daston can help organizations make the transition from traditional platforms to IT in the cloud.

Google Apps – a new way of communicating and collaborating
Wednesday, May 6
11:00 a.m. PDT / 2:00 p.m. EDT

Posted by Maureen Bradford, Google Partner team

Listening to Google Apps admins talk – with us and with each other – made it clear: as IT professionals, admins wanted a way to connect online somewhere in the Google environment. We heard a clear call for a gathering place, or community – a meeting point where admins could meet one another, identify each other by business type or geography, discuss topics unique to their roles, and share learning and best practices in a way that helped in their professional roles.

We wanted to make the site relevant and easy for admins to use, and we also wanted to use Google Apps as fully as we could. So we used Google Sites, of course, and integrated the Google products that most admins already use, like Google Maps, Moderator, and Forms. A few highlights:

• The Admin community map – allows admins to easily see where their fellow community members are located; also highlights further information with a "click" on the marker.
  
  

• "Share your perspective " – uses Google Moderator to let admins easily add their own comments to posted topics, or vote on comments added by others. We've set this up to feature four topics at a time, so there's always something to talk about.

• "Stay Current " – the latest product information and posts to the Admin Help forum, so that Admins can see what's being discussed in Support
  

We want this forum to create a sense of connectedness and community among the people who work as admins for Google Apps – a place where they can learn from each other, share what they've learned, and create a dialog that can help all of us learn. We also want it to be a place where people considering Google Apps can come in and find out more about what it offers, so we made this an "open" environment, where people can easily invite colleagues who might want to know more. There's even a way to send an email right from the forum itself.

The Google Apps team hopes that this community adds value for admins, and we hope you'll take a look today.

Posted by Monali Narayanaswami, Google Apps team

Editor's Note: We're pleased to welcome Chandar Pattabhiram, Vice President of Cast Iron Systems, as a guest blogger. Cast Iron is a market leader in SaaS and cloud integration with thousands of customer integrations connecting cloud and on-premise applications.

Cast Iron recently participated in our Campfire One event to announce Cast Iron for Google Apps, a ready-to-go solution for connecting hundreds of on-premise and SaaS apps to Google Apps in just days. Want to learn more? Register for Cast Iron's upcoming webinar on integrating Google Apps with other enterprise solutions.

Cloud computing is gaining momentum with organizations of all sizes. But many organizations work with a combination of cloud-based and on-premise applications. To leverage the many benefits of cloud computing, IT departments need to adapt to this hybrid world. That's where integration comes in. Whether building a recruiting app on Google App Engine or an enterprise gadget to create an analytics dashboard, IT has a fundamental need to exchange data with the rest of the enterprise.

Cast Iron focuses on solving this problem of connecting SaaS and Cloud to on-premise apps. For Google Apps users, we are excited to offer Cast Iron for Google Apps, which provides out-of-the-box integration with Google Secure Data Connector (SDC) and pre-configured connectivity to hundreds of applications to simplify Google integration projects.

SDC provides an encrypted connection between Google Apps and behind-the-firewall data, and Cast Iron provides connectivity as well as data transformation and process workflow capability. The net result is that Cast Iron for Google Apps is a one-stop tool to connect Google Apps with the rest of the enterprise.

Cast Iron offers a number of deployment models that all provide the same user experience and functionality:

• Cast Iron Cloud: a multi-tenant integration-as-a-service offering
• Cast Iron Physical appliances: ready-to-go-appliances for on-premise integration
• Cast Iron Virtual appliances: the same ready-to-go-functionality available through virtualization that can be deployed on your hardware in your data center

Join Cast Iron and Google for a joint webinar to learn more about Cast Iron for Google Apps and Google's recent developer announcements.

Connect Google Apps with Other Enterprise Apps Today
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
11:00 a.m. PDT (GMT -07:00)

You'll also hear from Doug Menefee, CIO of the Schumacher Group, who will explain how they used Google Apps, gadgets, and Cast Iron to create a portal for their 2,500 medical providers and doctors to access emergency room data in the browser anywhere, anytime.

Want to see the latest from the app developer community? Don't forget to check out the I/O Developer Conference on May 27 & 28, 2009 in San Francisco, California. Learn more.

Posted by Jimmy Caputo, Google Enterprise Partners team

Editor's Note: There's never dull moment in the world of online security. Threat patterns evolve in volume, sophistication, and the types of exploits and sources. News about the recent Conficker virus got us talking with Scott Petry, founder of Postini (original developers of Google's suite of security and archiving services), and Wolfgang Kadek, CTO of Qualys. Their comments follow. To learn more about trends in spam, hacking, and ways of keeping email networks safe, join Google and Qualys in an on-line conversation, "In Cloud We Trust," on April 16, where we'll discuss these topics live.

Q: Ten years ago, packaged software was the norm. Yet Postini built a hosted service - what we today call cloud computing. Why did you drive a cloud architecture for Postini?

Scott: We believed that by offering a service infrastructure we could prove a lower TCO than an on-premise alternative. With that service infrastructure aggregating data, we'd also have insight into a wider sample of data, thus providing a more effective solution.

Q: How did the idea of having a "perimeter protection service" to protect email networks in the cloud first evolve? Is the right model for the future?

Scott: Postini's innovation was to see SMTP as an integration API and DNS as a way to access traffic, thus putting us "upstream" of the customers' infrastructure, alleviating integration challenges and stopping problems before they reached the firewall. We saw this as better for a number of reasons.

Email servers have a long shelf life, and customers typically add incrementally to their system, rather than get a complete replacement. This causes a management problem for IT, creating a heterogeneous environment into which they must layer in security and compliance services.

We never saw ourselves as just an anti-spam company, so we built infrastructure that allowed a business rule to be configured as tightly as a content string for a single user. This design decision is inherently linked to the cloud. It allows us to deliver a better anti-spam solution, and also expand into content compliance areas.

Q. Wolfgang, you've been keeping a tight watch on the latest vulnerabilities impacting networks worldwide via your Laws of Vulnerabilities research. What are some of the trends you're seeing in 2009?

Wolfgang: Our research into vulnerability trends has shown that the industry overall did not improve significantly its ability to address security problems in a timely manner At the same time attackers have been getting faster and more sophisticated. Proactive security by maintaining systems updated with the latest patches is the cheapest of all security tools, nevertheless it has not grown in the way I would have hoped.

The first three months of 2009 have been a great example. We've seen Conficker infect millions of machines. The simplest way of preventing the outbreak would have been to preventively apply a patch, if available, to stop the worm. But figuring out such patches takes time. In contrast to worms of the past which often gave us months to react, Conficker activated only two weeks after the official release of the patch, clearly showing that attackers have become faster in their timing. It's getting tougher for patches to keep up.

Q: As network security budgets continue to tighten, how can "security as a service" be advantageous to users?

Wolfgang: SaaS solutions have the advantage that they have minimal setup and are immediately usable. Companies can get their feet wet with a small pilot, show success, and then grow it at their own pace to address larger needs. Organizations of any size can take advantage of the functionality and the predictable steady cost of cloud solutions, while at the same time enjoying the usability brought through constant improvements.

Scott: Agreed. As IT faces more pressure from a changing threat landscape and increased compliance mandates, the cloud model gives maximum leverage to IT – always important, but especially in this economic climate.

Register here for "In Cloud we Trust"

Thursday, April 16, 2009 1:00 p.m. EST / 10:00 a.m. PST

Posted by Sundar Raghavan, Google security and archiving team

Editor's Note: The spam data cited in this post is drawn from the Google enterprise security and archiving security network (Postini), which delivers an added layer of security for standalone mail servers and Google Apps Premier Edition customers. For a discussion of the anti-spam measures included in Gmail, please see this post from the Gmail blog.

In providing email security to more than 50,000 businesses and 15 million business users, Google security and archiving services, powered by Postini, process and cull spam from more than three billion enterprise email connections every day. This gives us strong insights into the state of the spam industry, some of which we share in regular posts to this blog.

Read on for a quick overview of spam trends and events in the first quarter of 2009.

What we saw in the Postini data centers

The most significant spam-related event in the first quarter of 2009 occurred when spam volume returned to pre-McColo takedown levels. By the second half of March, seven-day average spam volume was at the same volume we saw prior to the blocking of the McColo ISP in November 2008.

Spammers have clearly rallied following the McColo takedown, and overall spam volume growth during Q1 2009 was the strongest it's been since early 2008, increasing an average of 1.2% per day. To put that number into context, the growth rate of spam volume in Q1 2008 was approximately 1% per day – which, at the time, was a record high.

Of course, like every year before it, 2008 set a new record for overall spam volume. But in 2008 spam growth flattened over the summer and early fall, and then fell off a cliff after the McColo takedown (daily growth declined to .8%, .3%, and then .01% in the last three quarters of the year). This pattern raises some interesting questions regarding what we can expect in the rest of 2009: Will spam growth once again flatten or decline after a strong first quarter? Or have spammers – as part of their recovery from the McColo takedown – rebuilt botnets to be capable of sustaining or even accelerating this early growth spurt?

It's difficult to ascertain exactly how spammers have rebuilt in the wake of McColo, but data suggests they're adopting new strategies to avoid a McColo-type takedown from occurring again. Specifically, the recent upward trajectory of spam could indicate that spammers are building botnets that are more robust but send less volume – or at least that they haven't enabled their botnets to run at full capacity because they're wary of exposing a new ISP as a target.

New types of spam

The most significant development in spam vectors this quarter was the appearance of location-based spam. In this type of attack, users click on a link in a spam message and are directed to a page that contains a fraudulent news headline describing a crisis or disaster in a major city nearby. The attack customizes the location for each user by determining the geolocation of the user's source IP and then identifying the nearest major city. The addition of location creates a heightened level of interest, and the user is tempted to click on the embedded video – which in turn downloads a virus to his or her machine.

Meanwhile, the economy, financial markets, job cuts, and resume help continue to be the most prominent topics spammers are employing as lures for more traditional attacks. We also saw increased spam activity around the U.S. presidential inauguration and St. Patrick's Day, in keeping with the recent propensity spammers have demonstrated for reading the news and keeping their eyes on the holiday calendar in targeting their attacks.

Virus roundup

In early 2008, a trend emerged in which we saw spam messages with attached viruses (otherwise known as "payload viruses") spiking every Sunday, possibly targeting a maintenance window to catch corporate defenses when they were undergoing scheduled updates.

This year we've seen the payload viruses spread out across every day of the week, with no immediately obvious pattern in their distribution. It's difficult to say for certain what prompted the change, but one possible explanation is that spammers switched tactics because they weren't seeing the success they'd hoped for from the focused attacks.

Of course, payload viruses have also seen a recent spike overall -- in the month of March we saw a 9x increase from February. This pales in comparison to the highs we saw last summer, but it may indicate a developing trend that's worth keeping a close eye on.

Viruses delivered as a blended threat (when a spam message directs a user to a malicious website, which then results in a virus being downloaded to the user's computer) continue to be popular with spammers. E-cards are one of the best examples of this vector, and Valentine's Day saw a flurry of activity using e-cards to direct users to malicious websites.

Conclusions

Spammers continue to prove their resilience -- whether it's bouncing back from the biggest takedown on record or finding new ways to exploit the ways we communicate for malicious purposes, they're clearly here to stay. And Google believes firmly in the power of the cloud to protect your enterprise from them: Outsourcing message security to Google enables you to leverage our technical expertise and massive infrastructure to keep spammers from your door. See how much spam is costing your business, learn how much you could be saving with Google Message Security, or contact us for more information.

Posted by Amanda Kleha, Google security and archiving team

We often speak with customers who ask, "What can Google Apps do for my business?" We have a list of answers – communications tools including Gmail and Google Calendar, collaboration apps like Google Sites and Docs, and security tools by Postini – and we like to get those answers out wherever we can.

That's why we're inviting people in California's San Francisco Bay Area and Mountain View (to start) to a business roundtable reviewing Google Apps and sharing how businesses (including Google) use them to drive innovation and streamline IT. In the tradition of Google's internal "Tech Talks," this will be open forum for discussing insights and lessons learned from using Google Apps and getting the full benefits of this multi-purpose business "tool kit."

By the end of this event, you will have answers to these questions:

• What is Google Apps?
• How can Google Apps cut costs and create efficiencies – in other words, save money, time and headaches?
• How can Google Apps help businesses drive innovation?
• How are other businesses using Google Apps?
• Does Google Apps meet my business's technical expectations?
  

We're offering these roundtables twice, with limitied participation – so if you're in the area and want to attend, please register here with this form created in Google Docs.

San Francisco

• Tuesday, April 7
• 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM
• Google SF Campus (we will contact confirmed participants with details and exact location)

Mountain View

• Wednesday, April 8
• 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM
• Google Mountain View Campus (we will contact confirmed participants with details and exact location)

We look forward to meeting with you and providing you with the information you need to move your business forward with the help of Google Apps.

Get timely updates on new features in Google Apps by subscribing to our RSS feed or email alerts.

Posted by Jenya Denissova and Jeff Austin, Google Apps and Postini Team

When we first launched Google Video for business in Google Apps, we aimed to apply Google's video technology to solving real business and education problems. Google itself, and Google Apps customers, have been using the product for everything from executive briefings to extending training events to its remote offices to sharing wacky office moments with coworkers. In fact, we've been using Google Video to save both time and money at Google, making most video production a self-serve process.

Since we launched Google Video back in September 2008, we've been listening to customers and working hard to make Google Video even better. Today, we're excited to announce two major new features are available right now on your domain:

• Captions We've added a new captioning feature which allows you to give viewers a deeper understanding of your video. Captions can help people who would not otherwise understand the audio track to follow along, especially those who speak other languages or who are deaf or hearing impaired. You'll find details and administrative information here.
  

• Larger Uploads Starting today, users with Google Gears configured in their browser can upload videos of up to 1 GB in size, up from the 300 MB limit previously available. This is important to businesses and schools that need to host longer form or higher quality video. If you'd like to upload videos of this size, simply get Google Gears or Google Chrome to enable larger uploads today.

Check out these new features, and please keep the suggestions coming.

Posted by Vinay Siddavanahalli and Jared King, Google Video Team

What if we told you that a 35 minute tutorial would teach you everything you needed about keeping your Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Notes, or other on-premise email system safe from spam, malware, and viruses? We hope that you'd believe us, and that you'd give our new "Nuts to Bolts" on Google Message Security, powered by Postini, a view.

Don't have 35 minutes? We know the feeling. The topic overview (on the left) lets you pinpoint the subjects that interest you most.

This tutorial is just one from a growing library of information and resources in our Security and Archiving Learning Center. Find a moment to come in and look around.

Posted by Ellen Petry Leanse, Google Enterprise Team

On the heels of the Oscars, we're proud to have been named the best intranet search solution of the year by Intranet Journal. It's been a year filled with hard work, as we've seen the release of brand new search appliance software, as well as nearly ten new innovations in our Enterprise Labs.

As those who tune in know, the Oscars aren't just about the movies – they're about the fashion. In some sense, the same holds true for the Google Search Appliance: It's not just about designing the best search experience possible. It's about being well put together.

Setting up an enterprise search solution has traditionally been an "unattractive" prospect: hordes of databases, ranks of whirring servers, blinking lights and backups disks, all strung together with a mass of twisting wires and cables. Not exactly suited to the red carpet.

At Google, our approach has been to pair simple and timeless yellow attire with the power to index 10 million documents in a single box.

We're honored to have been recognized, and ultimately, we see this as being all about our users and customers. The feedback we get from you, the work of our partners and system integrators, the efforts of IT administrators who continue to push the envelope of the appliance and what search can do – none of our work is possible without you. You...complete us.

Here's looking at you GSA customers.

Posted by Nitin Mangtani, Google Enterprise Team

As you may have read here a couple of months back, we've been focused recently on the "art of findability" – or the ability to find and locate critical information quickly through the power of enterprise search. At Google, we believe that finding relevant business information through effective search should be as easy as...well, finding a yellow Google Search Appliance in your data center!

In this spirit, we're launching a contest to see how "findable" the Google Search Appliance is in your workplace, and to learn more about how search is making a difference. Two lucky winners will receive an all-expense paid trip to the Google IO conference and have a chance to tell their story during an enterprise search session (if that's not your cup of tea we can also shoot a video). Other prizes include two HTC Dream phones, and a whole host of Google schwag. The only catch: contest rules being what they are, we can only offer these prizes to winners in North America.

Want guidelines? Read on:

1. Take a picture of you and your Google Search Appliance. Pictures can be of just you, or of your whole workgroup, as long as you're near your GSA. Yes, the GSA has to be in the picture. Have fun and be as original as possible! Oh, but make sure that this is in keeping with company guidelines – in other words, get the right "sign offs" first.

2. Submit your GSA story. Read the rules , then fill out the form to describe how your GSA has impacted your business. What do your users do better with the power of search? How much time is your IT team saving? What's easy about working with the GSA?

3. The GSA team will convene. We'll look at your pictures and read your stories, and judge on both – 50% on the quality and uniqueness of your picture (look here for inspiration!), and 50% on what you say in your story.

Come on! Enter the contest. Don't yet own a Google Search Appliance? Click here to learn more. We'll share the news here when we announce our winners, so stay tuned. We look forward to hearing your stories and seeing your GSA.

Contest Deadline: March 31, 2009. Winners will be announced on April 17.

Posted by David Kim, Google Enterprise Team Member and Avid Appliance Photographer

If you've ever looked at your existing email system and wondered if there might be a better way, tune in to Andy Nallappan's online review of his recent migration to Google Apps on Monday, March 2, at 10:00 AM PST (1:00 PM EST).

Andy, Director, IT, Engineering and Enterprise Infrastructure for Avago Technologies (which provides components and subsystems to equipment manufacturers) recently migrated 3,000 of his company's employees from Microsoft Exchange 2003 to Google Apps – and he promises to tell all.

Explore the questions and concerns he faced as he researched the migration, including global integration, technology capabilities and workarounds, feature tradeoffs, cost savings, and more. Andy will share how he found his answers, what he'd do differently, what his internal pilot revealed, and how, in the end, Google Apps is working for his users.

This will be a clear, first-hand account what it takes to move a large corporate email system over to an integrated Google solution – and what that means for email systems of any size. We hope you'll join us, no matter what email system you're currently using, for a real-world look on what's possible in email today and what it takes to get there.

The agenda includes time for Q&A, so bring your questions and learn from Andy's experience.

Register for this free 60-minute webinar . We hope that you'll join us.

Monday, March 2, 2009 10:00 AM PST / 1:00 PM EST
Webinar: Avago Technologies: from Microsoft Exchange to Google Apps

Posted by Kevin Gough, Google Apps Team

Update (03/02/09): More than 200 participants joined in as Andy Nallappan, Director, Enterprise Infrastructure for Avago Technologies, reviewed how he moved 4,100 users to Google Apps, primarily for email, in Q408 through Q109.

Avago expects to realize $1.1M in annual savings from moving from Exchange 2003 to Google Apps.

If you'd like to tune in to Andy's story, here's the complete recording.