Google enterprise apps will raise Microsoft's hackles

Google Apps for Your Domain will provoke an aggressive Microsoft response, warns Gartner

Google's recent introduction of communications applications for enterprises will prompt an aggressive response from Microsoft, Gartner predicted today.

Google announced on 28 August that it will release a package of enterprise hosted applications, entitled Google Apps for Your Domain.

Included initially will be email, calendaring, voice over IP and webpage authoring applications.

"We believe that Microsoft is likely to respond aggressively," a Gartner advisory written by analysts Whit Andrews, David Gootzit and Gene Phifer noted.

"The rivalry between Google and other vendors like Microsoft will probably confuse the market by producing overlapping business models and unintegrated, competing products, but could benefit users of both product lines by invigorating competition.

"This announcement offers a glimpse of the scope of Google's ambition of generating significant revenue from the enterprise sector to avoid relying solely on the consumer market.

"Its plan to provide applications such as email, calendaring, instant messaging and voice chatting is a logical next step in the progression of deepening its relationship with users."

According to Gartner, Google's enterprise offering will stand or fall based on the levels of security, support and service offered by the web giant.

"The way in which Google chooses to address service-level agreements, security, technical support and integration with existing applications will be critical to Google Apps' destiny," said the analysts.

The study also suggested that the enterprise application offering follows Google's recent trend of placing its products and services directly in front of end users without the intercession of IT departments.

"We believe that Google has elected to offer communications applications first mainly because of their popularity," Gartner's report stated.

"Google's move will also allow time for productivity applications based on word processors and spreadsheets to mature.

"We expect that these services will initially be adopted by enterprises that have less demanding feature needs and are extremely sensitive to prices.

"Some enterprises will wait for a no-advertising version to become available for formal fees."

Gartner predicts that Google will offer subscription versions in the near future, possibly as early as 2007.