Buzz Out Loud Lounge: Prediction: Google In The Enterprise

Prediction: Google In The Enterprise

This will be the year for Google in the Enterprise. They will start by focusing on small to medium sized businesses and go from there.

I predict that Google will pull together more of its products into the Google Apps For Your Domain (GAYD) product line and make a seriously competitive offering that will take a chunk of revenue from Microsoft's Office, Exchange, SharePoint and Live Hosting business.

Right now, GAYD offers email and calendaring for a domain. Both are really good. They use the standard Gmail and Google Calendar functionality. Rather than having a @gmail.com account, you login with your domain email address. Chat works well with this too. They also offer page creator and a company start page, but those products are lame.

I am predicting that they will tie the following into GAYD and make a very competitive offering:

* Documents & Spreadsheets - this is currently not integrated, but could easily be. They have mentioned plans for this.
* Partnership with OpenOffice.org to provide an offline office component, which is a weakness of Docs & Spreadsheets now.
* Integration of Google Groups and their JOT acquisition to make a true collaboration environment for projects and workgroups. Every company needs this.
* With all these "apps", you'd see good integration with Email and Calendar like how Microsoft products integrate well with Outlook.
* A place to store all this stuff. It may not be billed as "GDrive", but it will be a storage place that has some interactivity to it.
* An option within this storage mechanism to treat a folder structure as your web hosting your domain. Rather than FTPing to your provider, you'd go to this folder structure within GDrive to do it. This will offer standard stuff like PHP, PERL, Ruby on Rails, Python, MySQL, etc. They will provide a way to register the DNS changes so this then becomes your website home. Page Creator would go away in this scenario, which is okay because it's awful.
* Google Analytics will be offered integrated into that web hosting site automatically.
* AdWords and AdSense will be automatically integrated into these hosting accounts.
* A bit of a long shot, but not unrealistic:
o They will offer an Email Campaign Management system that is able to track what email links a recipient clicks on (AdWords style) which takes them to a landing page (hosted on Google's web server and tracked in Analytics).
o Integration with other on-demand apps like Salesforce.com.

Parts of this would be free, but others will cost $$$ (especially if you don't want ads).

They have a lot of this already. If they were able to pull it all together, it would be a very viable option for a business owner and they'd take a HUGE chunk of revenue away from Microsoft.

Exchange, Office, SharePoint and even Windows would be unnecessary for lots of businesses!

If Google doesn't do this 2007, Microsoft will in 2008.

Love the show and Happy Holidays.

Scott