Google Signs Up Avaya and Postini for Enterprise Apps Push

Google Inc’s new Google Apps Premier Edition has attracted the support of Avaya Inc and Postini Inc, both of which will integrate their offerings with the new hosted applications offering for enterprises.

Google Apps Premier Edition is the search giant’s much anticipated attack on Microsoft Corp’s desktop applications monopoly and brings together the company’s email, calendaring, instant messaging, and voice over IP applications with its word-processing and spreadsheet functionality and email for mobile devices.

It is available as hosted service costing $50 per account per year, and also offers 10GB of storage per user, application programming interfaces for business integration, and 99.9% uptime guarantees, as well as 24-hour, seven-day support, and Google’s advertising turned off by default.

The Premier Edition builds on Google Apps for Your Domain, a free service launched in October 2006 including Gmail, Google Talk, Calendar, and Page Creator. That has now been renamed Google Apps Standard Edition and has also been bolstered with the addition of Google Docs & Spreadsheets and Gmail for mobile on Blackberry.

Additionally, Google Apps for Education, a free version with administration capabilities targeted at schools and colleges, also gets the new applications and a change of name to Google Apps Education Edition.

Robert Whiteside, head of Google Enterprise in the UK and Ireland, succinctly explained the difference between the Standard and Premier Editions. “Advertisers pay for Standard Edition, customers pay for Premier Edition,” he said. While he admitted that Standard Edition will meet a lot of user’s needs, he said Google had launched Premier Edition to respond to the demand for hosted applications with enterprise support. “We’re out talking to corporations with our Search Appliance and we see a lot of demand for email. Software as a service has been available for some time, but we’re really bringing this to the mainstream,” he said.

Helping to differentiate the Premier Edition will be enterprise offerings from third parties such as Avaya and Postini. Basking Ridge, New Jersey-based telecoms and networking firm Avaya said it plans to integrate its communications technology with Google Apps Premier to enable administrators to manage Google Apps users, or enable users to mix and match hosted and local communications technologies. The first integrated offering will be designed to enable companies to provide a single point of customer support using Google’s hosted email, IM, and VoIP applications, as well as traditional voice and data capabilities.

Meanwhile, San Carlos, California-based email management firm Postini said it will develop compliance and management offerings for Google Apps Premier, such as message recovery, centralized management, threat management, and archiving.

Avaya’s and Postini’s plans are due in part to Google making available APIs for integration with existing data migration, user provisioning, single sign-on, and mail gateway technologies. Google Apps Premier also features application-level control to ensure administrators can restrict the use of Google Apps to fit in with usage policies.

Like the former Google Apps for Your Domain, Premier Edition is also customizable so businesses can use their own URLs, logos, and apply corporate look and feel.

As well as new partners, Google also announced a number of early enterprise adopters for the new product, including Procter & Gamble, General Electric, San Francisco Bay Pediatrics, Salesforce.com, and Prudential Preferred Properties in the US, as well as Essilor and Mediametrie in France.

Whiteside admitted that Google Apps is not suitable for every user’s needs, he maintained that there is a large proportion of transient users within businesses who could benefit from cheap and easily accessible office applications. “Almost half of employees are not necessarily served by email today, but they still need to be communication with, he said. We feel Google mail is a fit there,” he said. As such, Google Apps could be seen as complementary to existing applications, or perhaps a method of avoiding unnecessary complex software licensing costs.

While offerings like Gmail and Google Talk, and Google Calendar are relatively mature products, the same could not be said for Docs & Spreasheets, the word-processing and spreadsheet application put together following Google’s acquisitions of the Writely and Upstartle offerings. While it is more than adequate for simple word processing and spreadsheet collaboration, the product suffers in comparison with the functionality of Microsoft’s Word and Excel for heavy-duty users.

However, Whiteside played down any direct comparison between the offerings. “With things like Docs & Spreadsheets, it’s not fair to do a one-on-one comparison with existing applications, because the difference is the collaboration technology,” he said.

Doc & Spreadsheets enables users to produce, upload and store documents online, as well as invite others to collaborate on them, publish them for viewing by invited third parties, and email them directly to other users. As such the product is not comparable with existing productivity tools, Whiteside maintained. “I think it’s fair to say we would not use existing products as a benchmark,” he said.