Google Inc

In Building 43 at Google's Mountain View, Calif., headquarters is a video screen that depicts the world as seen in Google Earth. Across a revolving globe, streams of colorful pixels, like sparks from a Roman candle, mark the geographic origin of queries coming in to Google's search engine. It's a real-time representation of Google as the nexus of human curiosity.

Google is different. And it's different not only because its thinking is original and its applications unique--witness search queries morphed into a lobby display of bursting color--but because the company's unconventional IT strategy makes it so. Commodity hardware and free software hardly seem like the seeds of an empire, yet Google has turned them into an unmatched distributed computing platform that supports its wildly popular search engine, plus a burgeoning number of applications. We used to call them consumer applications, but Google changed that. Businesses also use them because, well, Google is different.

The IT infrastructure behind Google's Web services doesn't matter much to the millions of people conducting searches, but it's everything to the hundreds of engineers dedicated to Google's mission of organizing the world's information and making it "universally accessible and useful." That calls for an IT plan that matches the company's business vision in scope and ambition.

Choice is always better than control, Merrill says.

Photo by Jeffery Newbury

Google managers tend to be reticent on the subject of IT strategy, they're loath to talk about specific vendors or products, and they clam up when asked about their servers and data centers. But a day spent with some of the company's IT leaders reveals there's more to Google's IT operations than a search engine running on a massive server farm. Behind the seeming simplicity is a mash-up