Google has been pushing its search appliances, email and online application services to enterprises for quite some time, but it's inability to speak the same language as I.T. managers on issues such as security has slowed their progress significantly. Consider their recent acquisition of Postini a major investment in overcoming their I.T. gap and providing new inroads for Google's ASP-oriented content and office automation services. Postini specializes in managing security for external communications such as email, messaging and Web site access with services that are compliance officer-friendly and that are totally outsourced.

Investors Business Daily notes that this places Google in competition with other security services providers such as McAfee and Symantec, but it's really a strong swipe at both Microsoft and as well at Software-as-a-Service providers such as Salesforce.com who are making quick inroads with ASP-based content and automation services in the enterprise sector. With its extensive range of APIs Google can now sew together a wide range of content integration capabilities - including embedded services and database services. With more and more content-oriented capabilities being outsourced by major corporations Google finds itself acquiring more and more basic building blocks to become a future "must-have" technology for enterprises of all sizes. But at this point that's still a future at best - beyond search Google has yet to come up with a killer platform that will be hard for major corporations to resist. Still, it will make it that much harder for competitors like Factiva to dominate in this space as Google becomes more of a go-to source for content and communications behind the firewall.

Labels: Deals Partnerships and Sales, enterprise, Google, postini