Google continues its march through the headlines. Following the confirmation of a Google tablet, and while still (and possibly forever) dealing with the fallout from its Chinese pullout, Google quietly hosted 400 CIOs and IT personnel at its Mountain View, CA headquarters, the Googleplex. On Monday, the sold-out crowd was treated to a look at Google’s newly upgraded cloud computing based Google Docs.
In the event titled “Atmosphere 2010”, Google execs did their best to wow and win over the IT crowd to their cloud-based software. The Google presentation unveiled multiple improvements to existing programs including faster and easier usage, and capacity increases that will allow up to 50 users to work on a document at the same time. Corporations with multiple locations and employees working on the same project but in different locations stand to benefit from hosting their data in a way that location becomes irrelevant.
Atmosphere 2010 is being touted as the first of an annual symposium to discuss the growing field of cloud computing. Google joins Microsoft, IBM, Cisco and others in trying to convince corporations to allow their documents and services to be hosted by a third party company’s servers, something many business are reluctant to do. The cloud system service model is a relatively new one, but potentially a very lucrative one, and Google is hoping to increase their presence in the enterprise side of software.
The event comes one month before Microsoft shows off its newest enterprise offer, Office 2010.
