Google acquires Web-calling service GrandCentral
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Google Inc. has acquired GrandCentral Communications, a start-up that lets users manage their existing phones and voice mailboxes over the Web as if they were a single account, the company said on Monday.
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Google Inc. on Friday will join the crowded field of services registering Web site addresses in a move aimed at encouraging more usage of the online search leader's free software products.
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(InfoWorld) - CapgeminiÂ , a major global services provider, has just partnered with Google to enable large-scale adoption of the enterprise version of Google Apps. Capgemini will provide training, support, integration, and other services to large organizations that implement Google Apps Premier. Itâs a small but momentous event, signaling increasing enterprise interest in free Web-based apps that look and feel like Word, Excel, and other Microsoft Office software. Google Apps was added to the portfolio of products Capgemini supports because the company believes demand for SaaS (software-a-service) productivity suites will grow strongly in coming years. Steve JonesÂ , a CTO at Capgemini, is quick to note that Google Apps will not displace Office, but will fill two niches: enhancing the ability of knowledge workers to create documents collaboratively and bringing Office-like capabilities to workers who would not otherwise have them. Nonetheless, adoption is bound to increase. "I'd expect more and more IT services companies will offer that kind of help desk and support around the Google Apps Premier environment," says Rebecca WettemannÂ , an analyst with Nucleus ResearchÂ . "Now is the time to definitely have advanced technology folks and strategy people, the ones who look a year or two ahead, to look at this stuff and stay abreast of it, even if the time isn't yet right to purchase," says Burton Group analyst Guy CreeseÂ . "A huge mistake would be to look at the offerings today, say they're immature, and then not pay any attention." At this point, with viral adoption of Google Apps happening under ITâs radar, attention is already being paid by rank in file employees. And Google is far from the only provider. Several smaller vendors with strong offerings, including ZohoÂ  and ZimbraÂ , compete directly with Google Apps. Cisco Systems now offers its WebEx WebOffice Â platform for collaboration, while a number of applications in Salesforce.comâs AppExchange venture into desktop productivity territory Waiting for Redmondâs shoe to drop Conspicuous by its absence is Microsoft, which has been unable or unwilling to come out with a hosted suite comparable to Google Apps. Many wonder if Microsoft is having a hard time figuring out how to develop a hosted version of Office without cannibalizing its offline business. "A challenge for Microsoft is to figure out how to get people to buy the next version of Office if there is also an on-demand version," says Wettemann. Yet few doubt that Microsoft will eventually respond with a direct competitor to Google Apps and other similar suites. When it does, the effect on the market will likely be significant. "I think Microsoft needs to worry about it now because it takes a while to get right," Creese says. "In hosted office suites, it's going to take a while for companies to figure out how they want the thing to work." In defense of the current strategy, Microsoft officials have said that Office has steadily gained hosted service components for years, and that combining local PC software with services in the cloud is the right approach. Steve Ballmer elaborated on this point last May at the Software 2007 conference. Last week, Microsoft released a unified installer to help users download updates for its family of Windows Live hosted services. Yet those who have been waiting for Microsoft to make a power move found the announcement underwhelming and dismissed it as cosmetic. Not a desktop substitute While many organizations ponder SaaS productivity suites, thousands of others have already implemented them. Web-based suites save on hardware and on time and effort for software installation and maintenance. They also make it easy for employees to share and collaborate on documents for a fraction of the cost it would take to implement an in-house messaging and collaboration system such as Microsoft SharePoint or IBM's Lotus Domino/Notes. Disadvantages include security concerns over hosting sensitive data with a third-party outside the corporate firewall, as well as downtime incidents that leave the organization without access. Upon close inspection, exiting SaaS suites reveal themselves as strong in certain areas and weak in others. In a recently published and widely discussed 55-page report, Creese took a microscope to Google Apps Premier, dissecting its pros and cons in detail. For example, Creese found the suite lacking in archiving features, such as records management and electronic discovery, as well as in analytics capabilities, such as analysis of content creation patterns. Google responded with a statement saying that the suite gives organizations "a new set of choices, many of which will complement and extend the power of the desktop, enhance group productivity and improve collaboration." Indeed, after weighing the pros and cons of SaaS suites, most analysts, users and vendors generally agree that these will not eliminate the need for packaged software suites. Because each model has its advantages, they work best in tandem, complementing each other. "We'll see more and more organizations that look to a tiered strategy for the way they deliver desktop applications. So rather than have a standard desktop, I may give Office to the folks in finance who really need Excel, while the folks in marketing may be fine within the Google environment," Wettemann says. The network effect At Adison & PartnersÂ , an executive recruitment consultancy, adopting Cisco's WebOffice has had a major positive effect, says Managing Partner Jim DiPietropoloÂ . The 8-person company has been office-less for the past several months, awaiting the completion of its new digs, which got delayed. With people working from home, having documents and calendars stored centrally in WebOffice servers has prevented the workflow from getting disjointed. "It ties everyone together," he says. Beyond helping with this temporary issue, WebOffice lets DiPietropolo and his employees be nimble in responding to client queries and requests while out of the office, by tapping remotely into databases and getting information on the fly. "From a business development standpoint, this has been a differentiator for us," he says. "This ability to instantaneously respond [to queries] really impresses clients." The significance of the Capgemini announcement, however, is that desktop SaaS solutions are moving upscale, from small businesses like Adison & Partners to global corporations â where dispersed knowledge workers are warming to the idea of collaborating on the same document in real time. âHaving a single version of the truth changes the business process,â says Capgeminiâs Jones, who notes that the e-mail round-robin that occurs in conventional document collaborations is eliminated. âReally, what weâre talking about is bringing software-as-a-service innovation to the desktop,â says Jones. âThe main way that people interact with a corporation is through the desktop. We are delivering software-as-a-service solutions into that market.â
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It joins the battle for mobile users with Google.
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Developers have big plans for Gears, the Google Inc. browser plug-in designed to provide offline access to Web-hosted applications.
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The company said that its new product would establish a cellphone advertising network in which Google would match ads with the content of mobile Web pages.
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According to Google, current Keyhole users will benefit from the expanded resources and operational scale made possible by the company&#39;s integration into Google.
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Google today added to its search technology holdings with the acquisition of digital mapping company Keyhole Corp, a move that has implications for its local search strategy and marks the company&#39;s expansion into subscription-based services.
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Google announced its purchase yesterday of Keyhole, a mapping company that uses satellite photographs to produce three-dimensional maps, in a move that could bolster Google&#39;s local search capabilities.
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InfoWorld - Google has acquired FeedBurner, a provider of publishing and advertising services for blogs and content syndication feed.
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Google Inc. on Wednesday branched out into 3-D digital mapping with the acquisition of Keyhole Corp. In its second acquisition this year, Google has bought a startup company that connects consumers, businesses
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Google is working with mobile content providers on a search tool for cell phones.
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Google Inc. has formed a partnership with Capgemini SA, which will provide IT services to large businesses that adopt the Google Apps Premier Edition hosted suite of collaboration and communication software.
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Google Inc. has bought digital map maker Keyhole, extending the search engine with a toolbox that can catalog almost anything in the world.
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(InfoWorld) - Google has formed a partnership with Capgemini, which will provide IT services to large businesses that adopt the Google Apps Premier Edition hosted suite of collaboration and communication software. A new member of the Google Enterprise Professional program, Capgemini now offers training, support, integration, and other services for Google Apps Premier Edition customers, the vendors plan to announce Monday. The partnership with Capgemini, one of the world's largest IT services companies with over 75,000 employees in 32 countries, makesÂ Google Apps more palatableÂ to large organizations that prefer IT services providers to assist them with changes and additions to their large, complex IT architectures. "Our overall partner strategy is to make sure that those customers that come on board have the services they need or request," said Kevin Smith, Google's head of enterprise partnerships. In the case ofÂ Google Apps Premier EditionÂ customers, some may hire Capgemini to help them with e-mail migration, with adding the suite to an existing single sign-on system, or with making sure that the Calendar component synchronizes properly with employees devices, Smith said. Meanwhile, Capgemini, which generated revenue of $10.4 billion in 2006, added Google Apps to the portfolio of products it supports because it believes thatÂ demand for software-as-a-service (SaaS) collaboration and communication suites will grow strongly in coming years, company officials said. For Capgemini, offering services for a SaaS suite like Google Apps Premier Edition is a natural extension of its broad expertise providing outsourced desktop support to more than 1 million users worldwide, they said. The Premier Edition, introduced in February, is a fee-based version of the Google Apps suite that is tailored for workplace use in organizations of all sizes. For $50 per user per year, it offers phone technical support, software interfaces for integrating suite components with other systems and more e-mail storage than the free Standard Edition. As CIOs and IT managers in large companies warm up to the idea of these Web-hosted suites, global IT services providers like Capgemini are drawn to develop services for them, said Rebecca Wettemann, an analyst with Nucleus Research Inc. "We'll likely see services providers start to recognize the opportunity to help implement these applications within enterprises, going beyond desktop management and delivering a heterogenous desktop to an organization," Wettemann said. Google, which generates most of its revenue from the consumer market through online ads delivered via its search engines and partner Web sites, has decided to broaden its scope and become a provider of IT products for enterprises. In so doing, it is locking horns with established players in markets like collaboration and communication software, and in enterprise search. Google Apps, with its Web hosted approach to collaboration and communication software, is seen as emblematic of theÂ threat this SAAS model presents to Microsoft's Office, the quintessential fat-client software suite. With an installed base of about 450 million users, Microsoft Office doesn't have a hosted version that is comparable to SAAS suites like Google Apps and others from companies like Zoho, Zimbra and WebEx. Google Apps includes word processing, calendar, Web page creation, spreadsheet applications, Webmail and instant messaging communication services. Among the advantages of Web-hosted applications is that, by holding documents in a central server, they allow users to share files and collaborate on them. Also, because vendors host them, customers don't have to worry about installing or maintaining the software nor about issues with the server hardware in which they run. Downsides include security concerns over the hosting of sensitive data with a vendor outside the corporate firewall, server downtime problems and feature sets that often are less extensive than the ones from packaged software products.
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IBM and Google have jointly unveiled portlet software that can be used gto integrate more than 4,000 Google Gadget services and utilities into the WebSphere portal.
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InfoWorld - Google announced on Thursday evening that a domain name search and registration service will be added to its Google Apps for Your Domain offering.