Google aims for corporate IT

The first thought that comes to mind when one hears the name Google isn't exactly "enterprise IT vendor."

And yet, the company qualifies as such. True, it's a recent and small entrant, but Google seems intent on becoming a powerful player in this space.

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The first thought that comes to mind when one hears the name Google isn't exactly "enterprise IT vendor."

And yet, the company qualifies as such. True, it's a recent and small entrant, but Google seems intent on becoming a powerful player in this space.

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"It's not a major focus area for them but yeah, why not? I think they have had limited traction in the corporate enterprise market, but that could be very interesting," said Citigroup financial analyst Mark Mahaney.

Google has enterprise products for search, Web analytics and mapping, and the company said it is committed to all of them. But how credible a provider is Google today in this market?

"It depends on how you define enterprise. If you say enterprise and include small- and medium-size businesses, then Google does have some pretty credible offerings," said industry analyst Guy Creese, from Ballardvale Research. "If you’re talking Fortune 1000 companies, I think they’ll have to change their stripes in a lot of ways to serve that market."

For example, Google’s enterprise products are generally very easy to use and set up, which makes them appealing to companies of all sizes, but they tend to offer few options for customization, a turn-off for large organizations, Creese says.

"Many large companies expect that as a given," he says. "That’s the thing that’s going to keep them from doing a lot of business with really large corporations." A way to change this is for Google to aggressively open up these products to external developers via APIs so that these partners can customize the products and extend their capabilities, Creese said.

Google seems to be moving in this direction. For example, it already provides some APIs for enterprise search products, such as the Search Appliance and the Google Desktop for Enterprise, as well as for the Google Earth mapping products. In September, Google also unveiled a partner program to sign up independent software vendors , resellers, consultants and systems integrators to provide complementary wares and services for its enterprise search products.

The Search Appliance, which starts at $30,000, is designed to index information stored in a variety of server-based data repositories, such as intranets, public Web sites, relational databases, enterprise business applications, content management software and legacy systems.

A simpler and less expensive version of the Search Appliance, called the Google Mini, costs $2,995 and is designed for use by small and medium-size organizations that want to make searchable the information in their intranets and public Web sites. Both products are hardware boxes with Google software in them, and both use the core technology that powers the company's search engine. Google Desktop for Enterprise is a free, downloadable software application that indexes and makes searchable the contents of PC hard drives.

Meanwhile, one of Google's most attention-grabbing products has been its free, downloadable application Google Earth, which it released in mid-2005. Based on technology and products it acquired when it bought Keyhole in 2004, Google Earth lets users "fly" around the globe, zipping from destination to destination and zooming in and out of cities, thanks to a multiterabyte database of satellite images taken at some point over the past three years.

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.