Google Gets Going on Enterprise Apps

How many ways can Google (GOOG) and Microsoft  (MSFT) butt heads? Search? Video? Operating systems? On the enterprise-software front, Google has launched a new offensive, targeting businesses that would like to switch to the speed and ease of Google Apps, but whose employees are just too comfortable using Microsoft Outlook and Exchange. On Wednesday, Google released a new plug-in that allows businesses to switch to Google Apps, but retain the interface of Outlook. Just download the plug-in, and Google will import your e-mail, calendar entries, and contact information over to Google's cloud, while keeping the Outlook interface intact.

It's not quite a hot knife through butter; ChannelWeb's Samara Lynn warns that when you deploy the plug-in, it may take up to 24 hours for Google to import all of your e-mails. But with this new tool, Google is taking square aim at Microsoft's enterprise customers, luring them into the cloud and away from software-based technology. Google has a number of natural advantages here; its premiere edition costs just $50 per person per year, and companies will no longer have to host servers on site, allowing Google to do all the heavy infrastructural lifting. Google Enterprise president David Girouard cockily promised CNet's Tom Krazit that switching to Google Apps would wind up saving businesses $17 per employee per month.

According to ComputerWorld reporter C.G. Lynch, Google announced the new plug-in at a San Francisco confab with numerous hot-shot chief information officers, including staff from the Morgans Hotel Group (MHGC) and Genentech (DNA). Meanwhile, Google Enterprise Product Manager Rishi Chandra was hawking the cloud at Boston's Enterprise 2.0 conference. "The cloud has arrived," he declared, according to CNet blogger Mike Ricciuti. "It's not a question of when, but how fast it will arrive."

Chandra had a strong argument, one that can't be welcome news to Microsoft. For one thing, he said, the consumer market is a dog-eat-dog world, where only the strong survive, and Google is well adept at constantly improving its services in response to the latest consumer demands. In other words, Google is updating its services almost in real time, compared with the glacial pace most enterprise services improve at. In addition, the cloud has an almost unlimited economy of scale, allowing business clients massive amounts of memory without having to maintain overheating servers chugging along to keep up with the latest in video technology.

So yeah, Microsoft has an alarmingly dynamic competitor and can't afford to rely on a corporate culture that values the familiar in order to maintain its hold on the enterprise market. But Chandra overplayed his hand at least once. "Reliability, with the notion that Web apps were based in a consumer world, it was expected that they were somewhat flaky," he said. "Now, Google cannot go down. Customers will leave us if that happens. We have invested in this." Google can't go down? I beg your pardon?