Mature Google products migrate to the enterprise

The Google Enterprise team consists of some 250 people striving to "Organise the information inside your company and make it accessible and useful". Compared to the Google mission statement, the focus has shifted away from the world's information and it is not about making information universally accessible (rather it is about understanding and respecting rules for information security within a company).

I attended the Enterprise team's road show in London, it was a good opportunity not only to meet some insightful Google people and discuss my ideas about using Google's ad services on corporate intranets, but also to learn about Google's enterprise products and strategy.

With the announcement that the application suite currently available as Google Apps for your Domain (mind this, September 2006) will be made available as Google Apps for Enterprise, a pattern emerges for how we may see future enterprise offerings from Google evolve:

• Google Apps for individuals: Typically launched with the beta suffix, applications are made available for free to millions of people. With the capacity to test new features in only parts of the user population, behaviour, adoption and feedback can be monitored carefully to produce what in the end is a thoroughly tested application with just the right features. The services are funded by advertisements, yielding a cash flow of $billions.
• Google Apps for organisations (a.k.a. Google Apps for your Domain): Allows you to access some of Google's more mature products through an internet domain that you own. Targeted at smaller organisations (typically up to 25 people) and educational institutions, the applications can be branded with your own logo but are still funded by advertisements.
• Google Apps for Enterprise: A new service, to launch 2007Q1, this will be Google's entry into the SaaS market. No advertisements: you pay for the service (pricing is not public). The suite will comprise Gmail, Gtalk, Gcalendar and Gpage, but I would speculate that Gdocs is not far behind. I would expect this to be an attractive option (depending on pricing) for many fast-growing companies that don't want to run all of their own IT. But the service is not for organisations where it might be an issue that data sits on a shared server and you have no transparency as to which jurisdiction your email resides in.
• Google Apps for "serious" enterprises: Allows you to keep your data behind your firewall if you buy an appliance to install in your server farm. Currently search, Gdesktop, Gmaps and Google Earth are available in this flavour but I would expect to see the Google Apps for Enterprise components, Gdocs, Ganalytics, Blogger and Translate to eventually make it to this stage. That data stays behind the firewall seems to be taken seriously: Even the map data set for Google Maps and Earth can be stored locally so that snooping requests to the online data set becomes impossible. The big advantage of these tools is integration with existing data and respect for authorisation levels: Search the document collections residing in document management systems and use Google Earth or Maps to work with data that has a geospatial dimension.

(This is my own interpretation of Google's "product maturity market model" and the categories in bold above are made up names, except Google Apps for Enterprise.)

With an army of volunteer testers and a huge revenue stream from advertising, Google could become a powerful force in the enterprise office application market. Competitors could be left fighting ad-funded free-to-use software in the small business segment as well as thoroughly tested, market proven and familiar applications in the enterprise segment. Nice to see a long-term strategy at work.

Tags: Google enterprise adwords Google Enterprise software SaaS search office suite Gmail maps Google Earth strategy