Skip to main content

Another tactic in Google's bid to capture the enterprise - when will Microsoft start to sweat?

Much of the attention Monday was given to the announcement that Google was acquiring AdMob. This fits neatly and predictably into the search giant's strategy of dominating online advertising.

What was not discussed as loudly is Google's relentless push into Microsoft's turf. Google is serious about gaining access to enterprise computing and the company recognizes where improvements need to be made.

Google has been pushing a couple of initiatives targeted to the enterprise. One is their search appliance. The other is Google Apps. The Google Apps suite of applications includes Gmail, Google Talk, Google Calendar, Google Docs and Google Sites. These tools are meant to support individual work and communication as well as collaboration.

There has been some acceptance of these tools among corporations. At $50 per person per year, the Apps Premier product offering is clearly a cost effective alternative to the Microsoft Office suite of tools. The problem, however, has been security.

IT managers have been reluctant to accept Google Apps. With the applications living in the cloud, IT managers have little control over the administration and security associated with the users, the data and the applications. Google has sought to address those concerns today.

What's Postini?

Postini was a company and also the name of a security tool. Google acquired Postini back in 2007. The company's premier product was designed for establishing and enforcing usage policies, rules and parameters on email. After the acquisition, Google integrated the Postini code into Gmail. This now allows IT personnel to administer Gmail in an enterprise environment to enforce security policies.

Google has now announced that they are working to roll out the Postini functionality across the entire suite of Google Apps.This will eventually allow administrators to set up rules that, for example, would prevent users from sharing a document that includes financial information outside the domain. This will provide a new level of control over how end-users share and collaborate on documents within the Google Apps infrastructure.

This whole initiative is meant to make it easier for Google Apps to make inroads into the enterprise. By overcoming the reservations and objections of IT administrators, Google hopes to make the Apps suite more competitive with the traditional (and expensive) desktop applications sold by Microsoft. In general, that implies Microsoft loses each time Google gains.

One final note: Google claims to make 100s of millions of dollars in revenues from the Google Apps products. For most other companies, that would be a significant amount of money. For Google, which racked up roughly $22 billion in revenue in 2008, Google Apps is a drop in the bucket. It behooves Google, therefore, to do what it can to ramp up the product or pull the plug. It looks like Google is willing to invest to make the product competitive and go toe to toe with Microsoft. Nevertheless, it will be quite a while before Microsoft begins to sweat.

Comments

Stephen said…
this is probably the best thing to have happened to Yahoo in recent times. Microsoft acquired Hotmail, and look where it is today. Its been a long time since I've come across anybody with a hotmail id.

And imagine logging in to Microsoft (R) Windows (TM) Live (TM) Yahoo (R) email! Or using Microsoft (R) Windows (TM) Live (TM) Yahoo (R) messanger! Imagine Yahoo's server farms running Windows!

Popular posts from this blog

Brazil - in a bubble or on a roll?

A couple of years ago, no one recognized the real estate bubble even though it was under everyone's nose. Now, analysts and bloggers are seeing bubbles everywhere they look. One of them, they say is in Brazil whose Bovespa stock market index has doubled in the last 12 months. Does the bubble accusation hold water? I don't think so and here are 7 reasons why Brazil is by no means a bubble economy: Exports have held up over the past year thanks to demand from China for Brazil's soya exports and iron ore. This was helped by the the Brazilian government's drive to improve trade links with Asia and Africa. Export diversification, spurred by a more active trade policy and increased focus on "south-south" trade under current president Lula, helped mitigate the decline in demand from OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries A "sensible" economic framework has been in place since the 1990's. This has included inflation

Thursday Bounce: Trend Busters, Swing Signals and Trend Leaders for July 9, 2009

This is a quick post to announce that we have published Thursday's Trend Leaders, Swing Signals and Trend Busters at Alert HQ . All are based on daily data. Today we have the following: 72 Swing Signals -- A couple of days ago we had 35 signals, today we have twice as many. Happily, we now have 65 BUY signals, a mere 4 SELL Signals plus 3 Strong BUYs. Whoo-hoo! 56 Trend Leaders , all in strong up-trends according to Aroon, MACD and DMI. There are 18 new stocks that made today's list and 60 that fell off Tuesday's list. 48 Trend Busters of which 5 are BUY signals and 43 are SELL signals The view from Alert HQ -- Talk about mixed signals. If you look at our Swing Signals list you would think the market was in the middle of a big bounce. BUY signals are swamping the SELL signals and we even have a few Strong BUYs. Yes, there's a good sprinkling of tech stocks and tech ETFs but the distribution is pretty broad-based with a good number of different sectors represented, eve

Unlock Stock Market Profits - Key #1

This is the first in an ongoing series of articles where I discuss what I feel are keys to successful investing. It is based on a post that provides a summary of the ten keys that individual investors should use to identify profitable stock trades. ( Click here to read the original post ) There are two basic steps to investing. First, you need to find stocks that seem to have some potential. Then you have to determine whether these stocks are actually good investments. There are many stocks that at first glance look interesting, but further research reveals that there are too many negatives to warrant taking a position. This first post in the series starts at the beginning: getting good investment ideas. Key #1: If something special is happening to a stock, it will be reflected in some kind of unusual activity in the markets. As individual investors, we will never be the first to know; however, unusual activity can be an early sign that allows us to follow the Wall Street professional