Google today issued a press release revealing it has signed an agreement to acquire Postini, a communications security and compliance solutions company, for $625 million in cash.
Serving more than 35,000 businesses and 10 million users worldwide, Postini is a communications security company that offers services such as message security, archiving, encryption, and policy enforcement. While it doesn’t sell software, Postini has messages routed through its system, which filter spam and then send them to their destination. It is expected that Postini’s expertise will go towards enhancing the security of Google Apps, which already has more than 100,000 businesses using its e-mail, calendar, and documents. The Google partnership will also give Postini a significant competitive edge over rivals Message Labs and MX Logic.
While Google Apps lends itself naturally to small businesses, due to the reduction in costs and management usually associated with enterprise software, large companies were loathe to use external systems for good reasons. The Google Blog summarizes the issue as follows:
“Larger enterprises, however, face a challenge: though they want to deliver simple, useful hosted applications to their employees, they’re also required to support complex business rules, information security mandates, and an array of legal and corporate compliance issues. In effect, many businesses use legacy systems not because they are the best for their users, but because they are able to support complex business rules. This isn’t a tradeoff that any business should have to make.”
Thanks to their acquisition of Postini, Google users and business clients will no longer have to make that tradeoff. The move has shown that Google views itself as an on-demand enterprise applications provider, much like salesforce.com.
