Google - The new Salesforce of the enterprise?
Google continues its march into the enterprise with its acquisition of Postini today. Postini is an email service that monitors communication for brokerage firms to insure regulatory compliance. It is a 100% hosted service. As the New York Times and others have reported, this acquisition allows Google to offer services to businesses via its enormous network of data centers. Yes, we’re talking about software as a service again.
What does this mean? A couple of things. Google is getting extremely serious about the enterprise space. Google’s strategy is to buy or build tools that enable it to take its consumer offerings into the enterprise in a credible and secure manner. Rather than build software products, most of its enterprise attack is going to be driven by software as a service solutions. And its offerings are going to be dirt cheap (or maybe even free) as it hopes to leverage economies of scale, its past investments in data centers and of course depend on advertising. In other words, Google wants to become the Salesforce of everything other than CRM in the enterprise. It sounds like a good strategy. Lets see whether the CIOs will buy it.
