July 9th, 2007
Podcast: Google & Postini execs discuss specifics of Google's Postini acquistion
Regarding Google’s $625M acquisition of Postini, today’s edition of my IT Matters series of podcasts is an interview with:
- Dave Girourd, vice president and general manager, Google Enterprise
- Rajan Sheth, product manager, Google Apps
- Quentin Gallivan, president and CEO, Postini
- Scott Petry, founder, CTO and exec VP of product development, Postini
In what appears to be a pattern of Google making its organization-targeted Google Apps-branded collection of online services applications more palatable to businesses (and clearly targeting Microsoft’s stronghold), Google today announced the acquisition of Postini for $625 million. Prior to today’s acquisition, Google had already addressed some major holes and weaknesses in its Google Apps portfolio when it:
- Rounded out its “Office” offering by acquiring online presentations solution provider Tonic Systems
- Launched Google Gears - a technology that makes it possible for Web-based applications to run without a connection to the Internet
- Offered a migration tool to help organizations dump their existing e-mail servers (eg: Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Notes) in favor of using GMail as their e-mail server instead.
To organizations, Google Apps represents a set of solutions that run in a private partitioned context that only members of those organizations can get access to. Among other services and applications, it includes applications like Google Docs, Google Spreadsheets, Google’s GMail-based e-mail service, and Google Talk instant messaging. For example, if CompanyXYZ wanted to make Google documents as an application available to all of it’s employees, it could sign up for Google Apps and, through a bit of application and domain configuration, then send employees to the Web address http://docs.companyxyz.com to not only find their word processing and spreadsheet functionality, but also any documents being shared internally.
But Google Apps has traditionally lacked some of the industrial strength it really needs to convince organizations they should be considering Google Apps instead of locally hosted alternatives. In addition to lacking a PowerPoint-like tool and having applications that died when an Internet connection wasn’t present, Google had some weaknesses on the security and compliance front. Through the partitioned version of GMail that’s offered as a part of the Google Apps brand, e-mails could not be secured through encryption. Nor is there an easy way to encrypt Google Apps-based documents (eg: word processing, spreadsheets) at rest (in other words, while they’re sitting on Google’s servers, even if it’s in a private partitioned area).
From a compliance perspective, Google offered no direct method for archiving e-mail in a way that it could be easily “discovered” later, perhaps due to an investigation by a Federal agency. While these two issues were not of primary concern to many small businesses, they’re clearly issues that are of import to big businesses and public corporations. The same sorts of companies that couldn’t possibly consider Google Apps for e-mail without an easy migration path off of Exchange Server or Lotus Notes.
Postini has solutions that directly address these and other corporate pain points. Policy-controlled e-mail filtering is another of Postini’s strong-suits. The fact that Postini had already integrated its solutions into Google Apps in a way that users of the premier edition (of Google Apps) could snap it into their environment apparently made it that much easier for Google to go through with the acquisition.
In the interview, I ask officials from both companies some pointed questions about what exactly this means for customers of Google Apps in terms of functionality and cost. Among the questions I ask:
- Now that Postini is a part of the Google Apps portfolio, will standard (free) users of Google Apps have access to it?
- Postini has a plug-in for Outlook that allows users to set e-mail filtering rules from the context of individual messages (that plug-in communicates those rules back to Postini where they’re managed on a user by user basis). Given Google’s typical emphasis on platform neutrality, will an equivalent plug-in be made available for Thunderbird (an e-mail client that is not specific to Windows)?
- Will Postini’s encryption technologies be used to encrypt Google documents at rest. For example, spreadsheets that were creating using Google Spreadsheets and that are sitting on Google’s servers
