* Postini offers a set of four hosted solutions designed specifically for Google Apps
Last Thursday, Google announced that it would offer Google Apps Premier Edition, a suite of productivity applications aimed primarily at small to midsized businesses. At the same time, Postini announced that it would be offering a set of four hosted solutions designed specifically for Google Apps. Postini is the only provider selected by Google to provide security and compliance services for the new Apps offering.
Postini’s offering include Message Recovery, which enables admins to search through users’ message stores; Content Management, allowing an organization to centrally manage all of its business policies; Threat Management, providing antivirus, antispam and other services along with policy management for individual users or groups; and E-Discovery, offering archiving and discovery of Google GMail and Google Talk instant messaging content.
The integration of Google’s applications and Postini’s services is important, particularly for SMBs, because it provides a relatively low cost and fairly complete set of services focused on content creation through the management of that content.
For example, Google Apps includes e-mail and instant messaging services, in addition to calendaring, Web authoring capabilities, word processing, spreadsheets, BlackBerry support and other features. Google promises 99.9% uptime for its Apps offering and a price of $50 per seat per year. Postini’s offerings are priced at $9.95 per seat per year for Message Recovery to $50+ per seat per year for E-Discovery.
This announcement is a good example of the direction that many SMBs are headed: using online applications with robust protection and content management capabilities at a relatively low cost per user.
It is also indicative of the growing trend toward mobility that I have been discussing in this newsletter – i.e., provisioning users with all of the tools they need through a Web browser. The clear business advantage is that it can reduce the cost of providing content creation and management capabilities, since nothing is rolled out to the desktop. For users, the advantage is the ability to manage content from any browser-equipped computer without being tied to a particular platform or location.
Is the combination of online applications and hosted protection and management services something that your organization would consider? Why or why not? Please send me an e-mail with your thoughts.
